King Louis XIV of France never said L'état c'est moi, Louis XV never said Après moi le déluge and Queen Marie Antoinette never said let them eat cake [Qu'ils mangent de la brioche]
Of course true scholars here on the blog already knew this but I didn't. Those famous royal remarks are among dozens of misattributed, misunderstood and outright false quotations in a fun little book just published by two academics.
In their Petit Inventaire des Citations Malmenées [Little inventory of mishandled quotations] Paul Desalmand and Yves Stallini delight in knocking down famous lines that were outright invented or wrongly attributed to great figures of the past. They blame lazy journalists and historians for popularising dodgy quotes and making them up because they sound right.
Among these apocryphal quotations is King Henri IV's Paris vaut bien une messe [Paris is well worth a mass]. No trace of this legendary quip by the ex-protestant king can be found in historical records. They suggest that it may have been invented by enemies of the popular 16th century ruler who switched to catholicism in order to have the crown.
Another quote spread by enemies is certainly Marie-Antoinette's Qu'ils mangent de la brioche, say the authors. The doomed queen never uttered the line or anything like it when the hungry Parisians were at the gates of Versailles. They trace the quote to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who described how, long before the revolution, there was a legend about a princess who said of hungry peasants 'let them eat cake'.
As for Louis XV and his supposed remark on the flood, the quote should be more accurately attributed to Madame de la Pompadour, the king's favourite in the 1750s. She is said to have joked to the king after a defeat by Prussia in the Seven Year War: "Après nous, le déluge". But even that is dubious and the remark was more likely to have been spread as gossip at the time, the authors say. 
Louis XIV never uttered the boast about being the embodiment of the state, says the book. The legend took off in 1655 when the 17-year-old monarch exerted his authority over the Paris parliament. There is no record of his using such language, which in any case would have contradicted his lifelong belief that he was the servant of l'Etat, not its incarnation.
Here are more made up or misattributed quotes:
Voltaire [picture] never uttered anything like his famous line on free speech "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". The authors say the quotation was invented in the United States and popularised in dictionaries of quotations there.
Machiavelli never formulated the concept of divide and rule [divides ut regnes in Latin, diviser pour mieux régner in French]. It is apocryphal.
Herman Goering never said "When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver". It came from a 1933 play by Hanns Johst, a pro-Nazi writer, whose character said "When I hear the word culture, I load my Browning".
Sartre's famous line l'enfer c'est les autres [Hell is other people] has been taken completely out of context, says the book. A character in Sartre's wartime play Huis Clos says the words but he meant that the presence of other people forces one to practise moral behaviour. It is used now as a way of saying 'I can't stand other people'.
And a final quote to end, La vieillesse est un naufrage [Old age is a shipwreck]. General Charles de Gaulle is famous for using the line, but it is often attributed to Chateaubriand. In reality de Gaulle invented it. Writing about Philippe Pétain, he said that he believed that the World War One hero would not have collaborated with the Nazis in 1940 if he had been his younger self.
Nicolas Sarkozy should leave Albert Camus alone to rest in peace. That sums up the reaction among much of the thinking class and of the late writer's own son to a plan by the President to transfer Camus' remains to the Panthéon, the secular temple where the France inters its greatest men and women.
The country is about to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the author of L'Etranger and La Peste. He died along with Michel Gallimard, his publisher, in a car accident in January 1960 near Sens, just south of Paris. Camus, a Nobel prize winner, has never been more popular in France and the world at large. Controversial in his life-time, he has emerged in recent decades as a towering figure. While the reputation of Jean-Paul Sartre, his colleague and rival, has sunk, Camus is revered as a humanist who twigged early to the evils of totalitarian ideas, whether of left or right. The problem is not Camus, it is Sarkozy.
The President is merely following a tradition of honouring the nation's heroes. Jacques Chirac, his predecessor, had the remains of Alexandre Dumas and André Malraux, the Gaullist hero and post-war writer, shifted to the Left Bank necropolis which houses Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, Jean Moulin, Marie Curie, Louis Braille and many less-known heroes.
But the operation looks too much like another stunt by Super Sarko and his slick staff to win public favour while his stock is low (down two points to 36 percent approval according to today's Ifop rating). The literary world and the left are always suspicious of Sarkozy's literary excursions. They also sense that he is using Camus as part of his dubious campaign on national identity.
They claim that Camus, author ofl'Homme Révolté and advocate of the individual over authority, would have been appalled. Olivier Todd, one of the most eminent of Camus' biographers, said "This is a gimmick. It's part of his technique of hijacking the intellectual milieu. It flies absolutely in the face of everything that Camus stood for.... Camus does not need Sarkozy. Sarkozy needs a little intellectual glitter."
Catherine Camus, one of his two surviving children, has mixed feelings [Sarkozy with her in 2007 picture]. On one hand, she approved because "this would be a symbol for people for whom life is very hard." But her father was a man who detested great honours, she noted. "That is why it is not a simple question."
Jean, her twin brother and co-heir to her father's very lucrative legacy, told le Monde via intermediaries yesterday that he is opposed. Moving his remains from his grave in Lourmarin, near Avignon, would be be a "counter-sense" for a man who abhorred pomp and state honours. He also suspects that Sarkozy is trying to cash in on his father, according to le Monde.
The Elysée has twice sent Catherine Pégard, a former journalist who is now a Sarkozy adviser, to try to change Jean's mind.
I have always found something a little macabre in the practice of panthéonisation. I would agree with Alain Finkielkraut (the football-loving philosopher) who says in today's JDD newspaper that he has nothing much against the honour. It would help show that a poor pied-noir-- a north African colonial -- was a component in Sarkozy's famous national identity. But, he said: "I have the feeling, perhaps superstitious, that he should not be extracted from his last resting place."
A small footnote. L'Etranger was the first book I read in French. As a 16-year-old British immigrant in a South Australian high school, I identified with Meursault, the anti-hero, as teenagers have done ever since. That book was for me the beginning of a long affair.
It seemed for a while that this year's Goncourt literary prize came and went without the usual row or scandal. Now we have one, of a sort.
There was general approval last week when France's most prestigious book award went to Marie NDiaye, 42, a Senegalese-French novelist. No woman had won the Goncourt for a decade, she is the first female black laureate and her winning book Trois Femmes Puissantes (Three Powerful Women) was a best-seller.
But then the media dug up her less than glowing views on President Sarkozy. NDiaye went to live in Berlin in 2007 "in large part because of Sarkozy," she told les Inrockuptibles, an arts magazine, last August. "I find the police state, vulgar atmosphere detestable. I find Besson, Hortefeux, those people, monstruous. That refers to Eric Besson, Sarkozy's Minister for Immigration and National Identity, and Brice Hortefeux, the Interior Minister and close Sarkozy friend.
That was too much for Eric Raoult, a prominent MP for Sarko's Union for a Popular Movement. He tabled a parliamentary question to Frédérick Mitterrand, the Culture Minister, asking whether "the duty of a person who defends the literary colours of France should not be to show a certain respect towards its institutions." Her remarks insulted ministers of the Republic and the head of state, he said. A Goncourt laureate should observe un devoir de réserve, the obligation of discretion that is required of servants of the state.
The Goncourt crew hit back today, saying their prize winners have never been bound by a duty of respect for the state and its leader. Christian Paul, a Socialist MP, weighed in, accusing Raoult of "ignoble intimidation... an execrable form of censorship."
But now NDiaye has spoilt the fun by trying to soften her words. On Europe 1 radio today she said she did not mean to cause offence. "I don't like saying things like that. It was very excessive. I do not want to look like I was fleeing some kind of unbearable tyranny," she said. "For a while, I have found the atmosphere in France to be quite depressing, rather morose. It seemed that Berlin is more exciting."
We are waiting for a response from Frédo Mitterrand, who has not said much in public since the media last month dug up his adventures as a sex tourist in Thailand. In the meantime, Sarkozy has been brushing up on his Goncourt winners. He has just finished "re-reading" A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There was a big row in 1919 when Proust won the prize because he had not fought in the Great War.
Thursday update: Mitterrand has entered the fray, not very courageously. He has refused to take sides. "Writers who receive the Prix Goncourt have the right to say what they like," he said. "Eric Raoult, a friend and a very estimable man, has the right as a citizen and a parliamentarian to say what he thinks."
PS, on the subject of the Great War, did anyone notice that Carla Bruni seemed to be wearing high-than-usual heels and really towered over the President at today's Armistice Day ceremony with Angela Merkel ? And why wasn't she wearing a hat:
Nicolas Sarkozy must be annoyed. Jacques Chirac, his former mentor and predecessor, has been snatching the headlines for nearly a week.. Hard on the heels of his indictment on ancient corruption charges,old Jacques has made a splash with his first volume of memoirs.
Usually quite private about his thoughts, Chirac unbuttons himself to some extent and settles scores with old rivals. The book, Chaque pas doit être un but [Every step must be a goal] has a terrible title. He says nothing about the sleaze around the Paris city hall during his 18 years tenure as mayor, but he provides a good glimpse into his four decades at the top of the French political pile.
A whizz through all 500 pages throws up a few nuggets. One of them involves Margaret Thatcher, the tough British Prime Minister with whom he did business while serving as President Mitterrand's premier from 1986-88.. I'm writing this from London today, so I'll start with her. The legend that Thatcher fought tooth and nail with Paris over EU spending takes a knock. Chirac says that he was a big admirer of the former "Iron Lady" and their closeness even made the late Mitterrand envious.
She was a fierce and stylish defender of British interests in her battles over EU spending and its farm policy, but she was always fair, Chirac writes. "Her inflexible, intransigent positions made her one of the most redoubtable personalities on the international scene...Her grandeur, in my eyes, stemmed first from the force of her conviction. She did not try to impose the authority of her point of view, but used all her energy to convince..." Under his premiership, Britain and France enjoyed a honeymoon, he said. "Our complicity even irritated Francois Mitterrand, who took umbrage in November 1986 at a Franco-British summit."
The former Gaullist leader, said his views on Europe were closer to those of Thatcher than of Mitterrand, a Socialist. In 1988, in the midst of her "handbagging" over EU spending, Thatcher agreed to "kick the matter into touch" to help Chirac's campaign -- ultimately unsuccessful -- for the presidency that spring, he writes. (Thatcher dealt directly with Chirac because he was the elected head of Government in "cohabitation" with the President, not appointed by him).
In November 1987, Thatcher told him of her fears for President Reagan on the eve of the Washington summit at which the USSR and the United States agreed to limit their intermediate nuclear forces (INF). "Ronald Reagan did not appear to her to be either intellectually or physically up to handling a long bout of negotiation," he writes. (I covered that summit and can testify to Reagan's shakiness).
The disclosure of the complicity between the pair undermines one of Chirac's most famous quotes of the period. After a heavy negotiating round with Mrs Thatcher in 1986, he asked aides: "What more does this housewife want from me ? My balls on a plate?"
Chirac writes for the first time of Laurence, 51, his elder daughter, who has made repeated suicide attempts and has been in psychiatric care with anorexia for three decades. He blames himself for neglecting his two daughters and wonders if this caused her illness. He makes no mention of his famous love life and talks of his devotion to Bernadette, his long-suffering wife, though she can be "too blunt" for him sometimes. His sexual initiation came while serving as a crewman on a merchant vessel at 18. In Algiers, the boatswain asked if he was a virgin. "It was very nice of him. It had to be done. He took me to the famous Casbah quarter... In the morning, I was no longer the same man."
Chirac writes with sadness and bitterness over his betrayal by two subordinates -- Sarkozy and Edouard Balladur, the Prime Minister who ran against him for the presidency in 1995. He writes off Balladur as scheming and out of touch. He is harsher with Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the President whom he served as Prime Minister in the mid-1970s. Giscard d'Estaing is vindictive, arrogant and self-obsessed he says.
He is gentler with Sarkozy, his former protege. "He had an iron will, which has not changed, to make himself indispensable, to always be visible. He was nervous, he would fuss over me, he was impatient to act and undeniably had a talent for generating publicity," he writes.Stronger stuff will come in the next volume, which covers his 12-year presidency.
Another surprise in the book is Chirac's high esteem for Mitterrand, the Machiavellian opponent who ran rings round the impetuous Gaullist when he was Prime Minister. He salutes Mitterrand as a political artist.
"The man I got to know during our meetings had excellent judgment and a tactical intelligence that I have rarely encountered in political circles,"
Chirac will hear tomorrow whether the Paris prosecutors are going to appeal against the examining judge's decision to send him for trial. They may bear in mind that over 70 percent of the country believe that the legal process must go on, despite the fact that he is France's most popular politician.
Admirers of Philippe Pétain, head of the wartime Vichy government, are dwindling but they still have some money. Today they paid 40,000 euros for the desk from which the old marshal ran his collaborationist regime.
The mahogany, empire-style bureau and two armchars and book cases were snapped up by the Association for the Defence of Marshal Pétain after intense bidding from a starting price of 4,000 euros. The furniture, sold in Saint Dié in the Vosges, belonged to a Jewish family from Alsace. Pétain's staff requisitioned it from storage when they set up the puppet government in the Hotel du Parc in Vichy in the summer of 1940. The family got it back in 1948.
"We have been searching for this furniture for a long time. We thought it had disappeared," said Hubert Massol, 72, a Parisian who heads the late Marshal's fan club. "This is quite an emotional thing." The items are to go to a Pétain museum that Massol said is being planned by the association. It has thousands of members, he told Agence France-Presse.
The marshal still stirs strong emotion among the older generation. Massol would only have been three when the parliament voted Pétain into office as dictator in charge of a new French State. He and his supporters subscribe to the belief, dogma for the far right, that the national hero of the first world war was a decent sort who saved France in its darkest hour. François Mitterrand, the late Socialist president, served the marshal as a senior official and revered his memory all his life.
The Association's site -- which is not very up to date -- explains that it is devoted to rehabilitating the memory of the leader whose early military honours saved him from a post-war death sentence.
"If Philippe Pétain was glorious in 1914-1918, he was great in the 1940s," Massol says in a speech on the site. "He sacrificed his prestige and his tranquility after a well-filled life in the service of the motherland.... making the gift of his person to France in order to ease its misfortune."
A new book, Naufrage: 16 juin 1940, by Eric Roussel, shows the extent to which the marshal was adored when he took over in 1940. Le Point magazine published extracts this month.
The Polanski case may end up costing the job of Frédéric Mitterrand, the popular nephew of the late president who became Nicolas Sarkozy's Culture Minister four months ago.
You may have heard that Frédo, as he is known, been hit by a nasty boomerang. His outspoken defence of Roman Polanski on the paedophile charges last week opened a boulevard for the far right National Front to recall the minister's own past as a practitioner of gay sex tourism.
[Mitterrand has spoken on TV this evening, See update below]
This is a very French, or at least southern European, affair because in the protestant political cultures of the north, Mitterrand, 62, would never have landed his job. His sulphurous autobiography, published in 2005, would have made it unthinkable.
Sarkozy appointed Mitterrand, a presenter of television arts programmes, knowing that his book, La Mauvaise Vie (The Bad Life), recounted his visits to brothels in Thailand where he said he paid for sex with boys. Sarkozy, who read the book in June, said this summer that he found it "brave and full of talent". In nominating the new Culture Minister, he was following the French tradition that the private lives of public figures are not a matter for public discussion. He should have known from his own much-reported love life that the old rules that protect the elite are breaking down. 
When Mitterrand took office, everyone (including us) mentioned his homosexuality and alluded to the critically admired memoir, but very few raised the details. These have blown up in Mitterrand's face, thanks to Marine Le Pen, heiress to her father's xenophobic Front National. She read out extracts on television on Monday night. "I got into the habit of paying for boys," said one line. "The profusion of very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide."
There is much more of this lurid stuff. Mitterrand himself calls it sordid. He writes, in Proustian style,of the exquisite pleasure of paying for sex. He refers to the Thai male prostitutes as garçons and sometimes gosses (kids). You could feel the embarrassment in the political world as Sarkozy administration and the mainstream opposition flinched from touching a cause launched by the unspeakable far right. The Socialists finally jumped in yesterday and condemned Mitterrand without calling for resignation. Today's main newspapers could still only bring themselves to give the affair minor mention.
Mitterrand has tried to take the high ground, saying: "If the National Front drags me through the mud, it is an honour. If a leftwing MP drags me through the mud, he should be ashamed." Sarkozy's team have tried to divert attention to the Front and invoked the old private-life defence. Xavier Darcos, a senior minister, said this morning: "It is the private life of a man which is in question, not the minister." Darcos also cited the literary defence -- that an author's words do not necessarily report reality. Sarkozy's advisers are talking about gutter tactics by the Front and a vile smear campaign.
These arguments do not wash. You can feel the tide turning. Mitterrand, a troubled soul with a gentle style, insisted on television after the book's publication that he never had anything to do with "little boys". But the damage has been done. France now knows that the holder of one the most prestigious government posts is an avowed practitioner of gay sex tourism.
It is unfair that Mitterrand is being crucified over a four-year-old book. And if a minister confessed to spending time with prostitutes in the past, there would be little fuss in broad-minded France. It is the suspicion of paedophilia that makes the difference. The possible involvement of children, that ultimate crime of our times, suggests that Frédo may be heading for the political guillotine.
Mitterrand is going on the main tv news tonight to account for himself. He is an eloquent and familiar figure after three decades as a television favourite and he will benefit from sympathy. It is possible that he will save his skin. Sarkozy will be very reluctant to fire a star appointee in response to a National Front campaign -- greatly amplified by the internet. But Mitterrand is now damaged goods and Sarko does not like that in his ministers.
Update: On TF1 television tonight, Mitterrand delivered an indignant but confusing defence. His memoirs were partly fictional, he said. He conceded that he had paid "boys" for sex in Thailand but insisted that they were all consenting adults. He abhorred sex tourism and was outraged by the notion that he was advocating paedophilia. Sarkozy had full confidence in him, and so on. The appearance was highly emotional but it has not cleared the air.
You remember this picture of Rachida Dati, the former star of the Sarkozy government, leaving the clinic with her new-born baby in her arms ? Her immediate return to work as Justice Minister earned her headlines around the world. We hear today that she wasn't holding Zohra, her daughter, just an empty baby-carrier swathed in a blanket.
This is related in a book out this week by Jamal Dati, the younger brother of the ambitious and difficult Sarkozy protegée who was cast out of the government last June and exiled to the European parliament. Scraps of A l'Ombre de Rachida [in Rachida's Shadow] appear in le Parisien today. They make clear that Jamal, who recently spent a few months in prison for drug dealing, is out to settle accounts with the sister whose Cinderella life story was meant to inspire France's immigrant working class.
Dati, one of 12 children of a Moroccan-Algerian couple, is depicted as hard-hearted and ruthless. Those qualities are usually mentioned by those who have fallen out with the woman who is seen by the establishment as a pushy parvenue. Dati refused to have anything to do with her black sheep brother when she was minister, he says. "Every time I tried to talk to her she turned a deaf ear." He accuses his sister of having him locked up because he was a nuisance. He gave a bracelet to Zohra, he says. "She did not even thank me. She just said 'put it down there'. She did not want to take the gift in here hands. That hurt me." 
The stunt on leaving the hospital last January was part of Dati's meticulous management of her image, he says. The child was taken away through a side entrance and then cared for by Dati's sister for months, says the brother.
Jamal apparently says nothing about the paternity of Zohra, which remains a mystery. But he describes the mortification of their widowed father, a strict Muslim, when it became known that she was going to have a baby out of wedlock. "For two months, he kept saying, 'It's finished. I don't want to see her any more'... We experienced the affair as a matter of dishonour. We are Muslims before anything else. My father... had to swallow his pride in front of the Arab families around us."
The brother says that his other siblings tried to prevent the book being published. They told him that he would be sent back to prison and that he would lose his own son, he says.
The book will no doubt sell well because Dati, with her glamour and steely style, continues to fascinate people well beyond France. She is already clambering back up the ladder, seeking status posts in the European parliament and keeping a firm hand on the 7th arrondissement, the Paris Left Bank district where she became Mayor before her fall from Sarkozy's grace. She is manoeuvering to run for Mayor of Paris in 2014. Sarkozy's local party chiefs are fiercely opposed, but she has a habit of getting her way.
Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president and author of the stillborn European Constitution, likes to be thought of as a bit of a charmer. He set out to enhance this image today with a novel which all but claims that he had a love affair with the late Diana, Princess of Wales.
[September 23 update: He says today that it is pure fiction -- see end note]
Giscard, 83, is having fun, of a dubious kind. His book, The Princess and the President, recounts the "violent passion" between a serving French president in the mid 1980s, and Patricia,"Princess of Cardiff" (capital of Wales, geddit?..), who is unhappily married to an unfaithful heir to the throne.
"Fiction or reality ?" asks today's Figaro, which has an exclusive on the book. "Only the former President has the key to this troubling story." The paper says the president gives very elaborate detail of the fictional couple's encounters in the palaces of France and Britain.
His descriptions of Princess Pat leave no doubt that she is Diana. "I kissed her hand and she gave me a questioning look, her slate-grey eyes widening as she tilted her head gently forward," the presidential narrator recounts. Like Diana, the unhappy Princess Pat throws her herself into charitable work while indulging in flings with other men.
In the book, President Jacques-Henri Lambertye meets Princess Pat at a G7 summit banquet at Buckingham Palace. He then holds her hand under the table on the train back from the 1984 D-Day landing anniversary in Normandy. That would have been three years after the royal wedding and Diana Spencer was 23. Giscard was 58 and bitter about losing the presidency to François Mitterrand three years earlier.
It has been known for some time that Giscard, who is known as l'Ex, was charmed by the young princess -- along with everyone else. In 1995, after spending the evening with her (picture above) at Versailles, he gushed over her eyes in a French magazine and called her Princess Charming. "I discovered she was also a cat, a feline. She moves without noise," he said. Giscard, who was and is married, had a reputation as a ladies' man when he was in the presidency. There was a report in the late 1970s that he crashed his car while driving home to the Elysée Palace in the early morning from un rendez-vous galant.
The cerebral and patrician ex-president likes to see himself as a literary figure. He was admitted to the Académie Francaise in 2003 though his only venture into fiction was an embarrassing and widely mocked 1994 romance called Le Passage. It sounds as though the new book is in similar breathless vein. Figaro, which is kind to Giscard, defends his right to scribble sentimental prose with lines such as "this sword of absolute love, whistling as it turns over our heads".
The Figaro plays Giscard's game, teasing the reader. "Discovering this incredible modern story, one can never for a moment forget who is the narrator," writes Etienne Montety, its literary critic. "One muses, amazed, about his stature in international public life."
On the matter of verisimilitude, Giscard might have been advised to proof-read his English. His narrator-president writes "I can still hear her saying in English... 'I wish that you love me'." That doesn't sound right.
Giscard is refusing to say whether this yarn has any truth or is just self-flattering fiction. There is no doubt that he wants readers to believe it. The title page carries the line: "Promise kept". The book ends. "'You asked me for permission for you to write your story,' she told me. 'I give you it, but you must make me a promise ...'."
Jean-Pierre Corcelette, a biographer of Giscard d'Estaing, told us this afternoon: "We know that VGE is a ladies' man...Anything is possible, but I think this is really the fantasmagoria of an old geezer."
Fact or fiction, either way, the operation sounds like another chapter in the posthumous Diana industry. The book may sell but it won't win any prizes unless there is an award for bad taste.
----------------
Wednesday update:
The storm of publicity seems to have taken Giscard by surprise. Today he has come clean and says the tale is fiction. "I knew her a little, in a relationship of confidence. She needed to communicate... I wanted to pay homage to her... Her inner feelings were disappointment and a need to be loved." He had promised Diana to write a book on "love stories between leaders of great countries," he said.
[Top picture, Giscard and the Princess at a charity event in Versailles in November 1994]
Jacques Chirac, the last President, has become the latest victim of the anti-tobacco zeal that prevails these days in France. Chirac's publishers have just delayed for a month the release of the first volume of his memoirs because his staff objected to a cover portrait in which he is holding a lit cigarette.
A dangling clope was a trademark of the younger Chirac, as it was of most French stars of the last half century. The picture is a nice atmospheric shot from the 1980s of the pensive prime minister of the time. It would not have made much sense without the cigarette, though smokes have been purged in recent years from pictures of Catherine Deneuve, Alain Delon,Jean-Paul Sartre,Albert Camus, Charles de Gaulle, André Malraux, the late writer-politician, and Jacques Tati, the late film-maker.
"The release of the book has been put back because of the cover photograph," said Elizabeth Franck, spokeswoman for the NiL publishing house. "Photographs of the young Chirac smoking are quite common. Everyone has seen them (but) when Mr Chirac's staff saw the photo on the cover mock-up, they preferred to change it for a portrait of his face alone," Franck told us.
The bon vivant Chirac, 76, stopped appearing in public with cigarettes in 1988 and made cancer research one of the main priorities. His presidency ended with a smoking ban spreading in public places. Nicolas Sarkozy, his successor, is a private smoker. He enjoys one fat Cuban cigar a day in the Elysée Palace -- but never touches alcohol.
The Chirac decision has been attacked as another case of excessive obedience to the anti-smoking fervour which took hold in Chirac's years in the Elysée, from 1995-2007. "Political correctness has struck again", said Le Parisien.
The doctoring of pictures has become an issue in the cultural world, with critics accusing publishers, advertisers and museum directors of air-brushing history in the way that banished Soviet politicians were once erased from Kremlin portraits.
It's pretty clear that historic pictures are not covered by the 1991 anti-tobacco legislation, known as the Evin law. This prohibits "all propaganda or publicity, direct or indirect, in favour of tobacco and its products."
Géard Audureau, chief of the Non-smokers' Rights campaign organisation, called the Chirac cover-change silly. "This is an image of the young Chirac from a time when he smoked. It does not shock me to see a smoking president because it was the reality in that period," he told us. "It is an old-fashioned picture which does not promote tobacco."
Audureau compared the decision to other acts of censorship this year. They have involved Audrey Tautou, the actress, Delon and Tati, who invented and played the comic Monsieur Hulot. The Christian Dior perfume company was widely criticised in the spring for removing a cigarette from a 1960s portrait of Delon which it is using in a current campaign [Pictures below]. The Paris transport system (RATP) refused to carry film posters of Tautou starring as Coco Chanel because her character was smoking.
Readers here will remember that a full-scale row broke out when the RATP forced the state Cinémathèque to remove Monsieur Hulot's trade-mark pipe from posters advertising a festival of Tati's work. That act, in which the pipe was replaced by a child's windmill, prompted a petition by the League of Human Rights. "It is necessary to mobilise people in the face of spreading political correctness which does not hesitate to deform works of national heritage," it said.
The RATP backed down after Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, added her voice to the outcry against the altered picture. "I am not in favour of taking Jacques Tati's pipe away from him," said Bachelot.
I wonder what will be the fate of the celebrated pipe and whisky bottles of Captain Haddock, the friend of Tintin, when Steven Spielberg produces his forthcoming Hollywood version of the cartoon boy reporter.
Get ready for some Anglo-Saxon gloating. We hear today that France is giving up its four-year struggle to keep the barbarians of Google from Gallic gates, at least in their literary form.
"Google has won", said the headline in La Tribune, a business daily. It reported that the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) -- the national library -- is on the verge of a deal under which Google will add its stocks to its controversial digital library.
The pact will mark a big climb-down because the BNF led the counter-attack that was noisily launched by President Chirac in early 2005 against what France saw as a dangerous new American imperialism. That spring, Paris mustered continental backing for a European Union virtual library called Europeana, which has had a shaky existence since it went online last year.
According to Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the BNF chief at the time, Europe's literary and cultural heritage was under digital threat from les Anglo-Saxons. France faced the prospect of being force-fed with such things as the biased English-language version of its revolution in which "valiant British aristocrats triumphed over bloodthirsty Jacobins and the guillotine blotted out the rights of man", said Jeanneney (he has since lost his job).
Pierre Assouline, a writer with a popular Paris literary blog, pronounced an acid verdict on the surrender today: "It will thus have taken four years for the BNF to pass from resistance to collaboration." Some readers joined the lament. "The harm is done, now that the European mountain gave birth to a mouse," wrote a patriotic book-lover called Thierry. However the main reaction from France has not been shock and horror, just a virtual shrug.
Economics explain the shift, said Denis Bruckmann, director of collections at the BNF, which joins 29 other major world libraries in opening its shelves to Google's project (including Oxford's Bodleian). France provides only five million euros a year for digitizing books. This is done by Gallica, the national digital library. Yet the BNF needs up to 80 million euros just for its works from the Third Republic era (1870 to 1940), said Bruckmann. "We will not stop our own digitizing programme, but if Google can enable us to go faster and farther, then why not?"
Google scans almost free and it has so far added some 10 million works to its Books search base, the great majority of them out of copyright. These can be read free, while only extracts are available from the rest. In a development that could upset the dominance of Amazon, Google now plans to start charging for e-books online.
After a long battle, Google last year reached a settlement with publishers in the United States over copyright infringement, but resistance continues, especially in Europe. The US Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing Google's US deal on several grounds, including its possible creation of a monopoly over millions of copyright-protected books that are no longer in print. The UK Booksellers' Association voiced similar concerns. In June, the German Government said that Google Books threatened European culture and media.
In France, publishers and booksellers are worried about the forthcoming e-book revolution. Strict laws on pricing have helped 12,000 bookshops survive while small sellers in many countries have been driven out by the big chains. It is doubtful whether the French protection rules can be applied to electronically-delivered books.Amazon isn’t launching its Kindle in France until next year and Google's pay book service is still some way off. Before the Americans move in, the French industry wants to create a national "digital distribution platform" to sell e-books. Alain Kouck, the chief of Editis, the number two national publisher, called in la Tribune today for the circling of French wagons before Amazon and Google come galloping over the horizon.
[Top picture, the Richelieu reading room in the old National Library.]
For over a century, when The Times' Paris bureau has needed an English-language book in a hurry, someone has walked a couple of hundred yards down the Avenue de l'Opéra to buy it at Brentano's. Sadly, the habit came to an end 10 days ago with the demise of the American bookstore that has been a Paris fixture since 1895.
The old shop at 37 Avenue de L'Opéra, whose customers included Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, was shut after its landlord, the BNP Parisbas bank, won a liquidation order for non-payment of rent. For some time, the store was locally owned, no longer part of the historic New York-based company which is now a brand in the Borders Group.
Brentano's was a Paris American institution like the Herald Tribune newspaper. It supplied reading on the old trans-Atlantic steamers and it was appreciated by US expatriates. The Nazi invaders shut down the shop when they arrived in June 1940 and turned it into the film and camera supply centre for the Wehrmacht. At the start of the occupation, a German official walked in and ordered 6,000 books, including 349 assorted titles in Everyman's Library, a variety of art books, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley's Lover and some expensive erotica (The tale comes from the Brentano's site, which is still open).
During the occupation, the Brentano parent company published French writers such as André Maurois and André Gide and the books were smuggled into France via the Free French forces in north Africa.
Like many other bookshop owners, Chantal and Jean-Marc Bodez, Brentano's last proprietors, could not keep up with soaring inner-city rent. The BNP had raised it from 75,000 euros a year to 200,000.
Independent bookshops have been closing everywhere in the world, but they are better protected in France than most places because the law does not allow price discounting. Brentano's suffered from the lower prices for English-languages books on the big internet chains.
And almost no-one sells books in the prized retail zone between the Louvre and the Opéra. A nearby exception remains WH Smiths', the branch of the UK chain on the rue de Rivoli opposite the Tuileries gardens. Another is Galignani, an historic shop also on the Rue de Rivoli. And of course there is always Shakespeare & Co on the Left Bank. Here's a list of English-language bookstores in Paris
And it's not just Brentano's who are pulling out of the Opéra quartier. The Times is about to do so too -- after an extraordinary two centuries. We're not closing, just moving, but that's another story to which I shall return.
![Bac_philo[1]](http://timescorrespondents.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451d14e69e2011570316441970c-400wi)
I did not envy my son this morning when, along with 331,575 teenagers across France, he sat down at 8am for the four-hour ordeal of le bac philo.
The philosophy test, or rather torture, is still the "royal subject" of the baccalauréat, the national high school examination that opens the way to university and adulthood. Apart from students in trades and technical schools, all pupils are obliged to take the philosophy exam.
Literacy may be declining in France like everywhere else but it says something about the intellectual skills still required of the young that about half of all late teenagers in France earn a baccalauréat that includes philosophy.
The bac, with its centralised, simultaneous examinations is a ritual of a rare kind. For weeks the media have built up to the big moment of the bac philo -- the opening test -- with tips on subjects and handling stress and bac memoirs from celebrities. Today, television and radio are reporting from the school gates.
The philosophy questions have just been released. My son, who's just 18, was required to dissert on one of the following two questions: What is gained by exchange ? (Que gagne-t-on à échanger) and Does technological development transform mankind? (Le développement technique transforme-t-il les hommes ?). [More questions below]
You can't just wing it with a ramble around the subject. Like most French disciplines, structure and method are vital. The reasoning has to follow rules and you must cite the appropriate great thinkers as you set out your argument.
The baccalauréat has demanding equivalents in other countries. But the continuing rigour of the system helps explain why the average French person is more articulate, more able to express him or herself on abstract subjects, than, say, average Britons or Americans.
The baccalauréat, inaugurated by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1808, was designed to promote the post-revolutionary ideal of a nation of rational citizens. Luc Ferry, a philosopher who served as Education Minister from 2002-2004, explained it on the radio this morning as the kids were drafting their philo answers: "When the bac was created, the idea was that in order to become a citizen and be capable of voting, you had to be able to sort out ideas and argue them in public. That remains true today," he said (I wonder how many professional philosophers have served as Education Minister in the UK).
There is much that can be criticised in the baccalauréat and a system run by a Ministry of Education that commands an unbelievable 1.2 million staff. The baccalauréat is too elitist, some say. Fewer than half the children of working class parents earn the certificate that gives passage to university. Others say standards have been dumbed down too far now that 63 percent of all teenagers earn the bac, compared with just 20 percent in 1970.
It's also true that the French education system emphasises information and rules rather than imagination and that secondary students perform modestly in international comparisons, such as that of the annual OECD ranking. Another point, from which my two teenagers have suffered in childhoods in French schools; is a teaching culture which relies more on criticism than encouragement.
Xavier Darcos, the teacher who is current Education Minister (and is probably about to be replaced) has been warring with the unions over redeploying resources and cutting teaching staff. Something must be wrong, he says, if France spends more than the European average on education but scores mediocre results. The unions answer that by saying the OECD rankings -- which routinely put Finland top in Europe -- are biased towards nordic and and Anglo-Saxon methods and do not take account of French priorities.
President Sarkozy has run into resistance from the education establishment in his attempts to remedy some of the flaws. His latest idea, floated last week, is for schools to open outside classroom hours and at weekends to offer extra-curricular activities. Traditionally, French schools are teaching machines. Sports, hobbies and other youth activities are largely organised by other institutions.
But putting aside the problems, the baccalauréat remains a sterling asset for France. It's internationally admired and its international -- less Gallic -- version is taken in many other countries. Perhaps I am out of date and I certainly would not have fancied doing le bac philo myself. But it remains impressive that so many kids reach a level at which they can hold forth for four hours on existential matters such as the following from today's other general baccalauréat streams.
For science students: 1) Is it absurd to desire the impossible? 2) Are there questions which no science can answer?
For the literature stream: 1) Does objectivity in history suppose impartiality in the historian ? 2) Does language betray thought ?
My son's two questions came from the economics and social science stream. He choses the one on exchange and reassures me that he wrote a suitably leftwing answer which did not sing the praises of commercial exchange. He kept it broad and talked about moral matters (The French curriculum and teachers are slanted solidly to the left). As well as the essay, the students have the option of writing a commentary on a short unprepared text.
France has a rich tradition of dictionaries and encyclopedias and the publishers are not giving up in the face of the competition from the internet. Tomorrow sees the publication of the latest Petit Larousse, a dictionary-reference book which has been part of French family life since Pierre Larousse invented it in 1905.
The Petit Larousse is serious and known for its fine illustrations but it is not set in stone like the dictionary of the august Académie Française, the official guardian of the language. It keeps pace with trends and mirrors the prevailing culture. So it's always interesting to note the new expressions and the people whom it adds to its new editions. The arrivals this year include Audrey Tautou, Barack Obama and George Clooney.
The inclusion of show-biz personalities is part of "la pipolisation" of French life. That word, which means celebrity culture and originated in the 1990s from the US People magazine, is one of 150 new terms in the Larousse dictionary section. There are a few from Belgium, Quebec and other parts, and some, like barré (crazy, eccentric) are current French slang but many, inevitably, have been adopted from American
They include buzz, burn-out, geek, fantasy (in the sense of Tolkien-style, nordic mythology entertainment), peer-to-peer, caster (meaning to cast in the theatre sense), blacklister (to blacklist), clubbeur/clubbeuse and toxique, in the sense of waste or loans. The new toxique is one of many examples of English usage being overlaid on old French words. A typical classic example is réaliser, which took on the English sense of to realize as well as its French meaning of to carry out. (The shift took place in the 1920s, according learned commentators below)
This may drop out of the language as fashion passes. Larousse is not sanctifying language like the Académie, whose dictionary is a safe half century or so behind the times. It just tries to reflect current use.
You can understand why French embraces American jargon when it encapsulates a sense for which nothing native has been invented. English has done that with dozens of French words (chic, chagrin, nuance, frisson...) over the past couple of centuries. Le buzz sounds ugly in French but it is a single syllable which French takes a mouthful to render as "rumeur, retentissement médiatique, notamment autour de ce qui est perçu comme étant à la pointe de la mode" as Larousse puts it.
But a lot of the English borrowing is superfluous or silly. Gilles Vigneault, a venerable Quebec singer-poet, was making the point on Europe1 radio this morning. Why say burn-out when there is a perfectly good French word for it, épuisement (exhaustion), he said. My list of recent silly franglais would include relooker (to make over), le fooding (a restaurant fashion involving modern cuisine and trendy décor) and sur-booké (booked out). All have been registered by Larousse.
To get back to less topical matters, this edition marks the 120th anniversary of La Semeuse (the sower), the illustration of a woman blowing dandelion seeds in the wind, which Larousse adopted for his publishing house in 1890 [Dandelion, an English borrowing from the French dent-de-lion, or lion's tooth]. And here is one of the famous nature illustrations: from le Petit Larousse.
The personal drivers of the past two French Presidents have caused a stir in recent years with indiscreet memoirs that reported on their master's lurid private lives. The latest exercise in the drive-and-tell genre is by Carla Bruni's chauffeur-assistant.
But Franck Demules, known as Franky, offers a reversal of the usual sensation. While the civil servant chauffeurs of Presidents Miterrand and Chirac spilled the beans on their bosses' amorous antics, Demules describes life in the showbiz world of sex, drugs and rock n'roll while making France's première dame sound like a saint.
Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, both former lovers, feature among the stars in the biography of Demules, who has worked for the past decade as confidant, driver, personal assistant and fixer for Bruni. In Un Petit Tour en Enfer (A Little Trip in Hell) Demules, 43, a former actor and cocaine addict who spent time in prison for fraud, reveals no secrets but he offers a glimpse of life in a world far removed from the decorum of the Elysée palace. Bruni and Sarkozy, whom she met and married over the winter of 2007-8, emerge as saviours of the man who describes himself as "the queen's devoted musketeer".
Sarkozy called in Demules when he returned from a rehabilitation course in Canada last February and "in a kind way told me to think of the future." The President advised him to throw himself into work: "If you knew, Franck, how much effort I had to put in in order to get here," said Sarkozy.
Demules returned to the bottle and suffered depression last year after Bruni's marriage sidelined him as her minder-in-chief. Bruni signed him into a clinic near Paris on the recommendation of her friend Marianne Faithful, the British singer. She then proposed a New Year's stay in "her friend Eric Clapton's (rehab) centre in the Caribbean." His English was not good enough so he went to Quebec.
Demules, the victim of long-term sexual abuse as a child, describes how Carla and Valéeria, her actress sister, gave him lodging and work in the mid-1990s after his young wife had died of Aids. Soon Bruni had entrusted him with her credit card and her secrets, he writes. Among other things, the Brunis paid for the schooling of his daughter, now 19 and Carla helped him overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
Demules writes with affection for Raphael Enthoven, the philosopher who was Bruni's last partner and father of their son. He describes Endhoven's "ballsy" courage in a brawl which they had with two strangers in an underground car park. Bruni's entourage has a list of friends classed by order of importance. "Mick Jagger is God," says Demules. The chief Rolling Stone behaves like a perfect gentleman at Bruni's concerts, he says. He contrasts him with Karl Lagerfeld, the Chanel designer, who sweeps up with an entourage and demands movie-star treatment.
Serving Bruni has its tough moments, he says. One was taking Naomi Campbell shopping. On a visit to Au Bon Marché, the Left Bank department store, the former supermodel was so fierce that no-one dared talk to her, he writes.
Demules describes the shock and disapproval among friends in the leftwing entourage when Bruni began her romance with France's defiantly rightwing president. "It was violent. You would have thought I was a traitor to the cause," he writes. Since then, former anti-Sarkozy members of the circle have been asking him to intervene for presidential favours.
Franky organised the President's first birthday party after his marriage. He says that he still feels uncomfortable working with the presidential body guards, all police officers. "At the beginning it stressed me. Even if you have nothing to feel guilty about, you are always a bit scared that you might have forgotten something," he writes.
Demules realised that his boss and the President were in love when he dropped her off in the rain at the Elysée one rainy afternoon in the zinter last year. The President telephoned him and invited him to drive in with his battered car and dog. "I was impressed. The president received me divinely, offering me sausage that he had brought back from Corsica."
Bruni has redeemed him, writes Demules. "Without Carla, some people would not have talked to me. I would have stayed the former junky whose wife died of Aids, the crazy, uncontrollable guy."
Bruni has given her blessing to the book, but warned him "they'll try to make it about me, but don't be pushed around." The premiere dame talked in the latest Paris Match about her attachment to her Franky. "When I got married I never imagined for a second that I would let him go. Even if I am now very protected, there is a heap of personal and intimate things that I do not dare ask of the palace personnel or the security officers."
 Regulars on this blog will be saddened to hear that Peter Kinsley has passed away. He died peacefully at his London home last weekend, Roger Wickham, his publisher, told me. He was 74.
We will miss Peter's contributions -- always rich, colourful and full of tales of the golden age of Fleet Street and his life on the road around Europe. In his last, on April 3, he recalled covering celebrities in the 1960s. He had a full life as a journalist in Britain, then around Mediterranean and as a novelist and memoir writer. Here's a typical taste of Peter's newspaper years, from his biography on his web site. --
Fleet Street was still a Street of Adventure, and Peter drank with Oscar Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, lunched with the Duke of Bedford in the Savoy Grill and at the Ritz Hotel, interviewed the singer Shirley Bassey in bed with her after she was held at gunpoint by a crazed lover (she told him to jump in because the room was cold as the central heating had been turned off during the police siege at the Cumberland Hotel). He met Augustus John and Lucien Freud and dined with Francis Bacon, interviewed Jean Cocteau and Alec Guinness, Trevor Howard, Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale, Richard Harris, Burt Lancaster, Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Harold Lloyd, Robert Mitchum, drank with William Somerset Maugham and swam in the pool in Monte Carlo with Princess Grace.
Peter had a long connection with France, first in military service at Fontainebleau in the 1950s and later living in the southern Languedoc region for 18 years in the 1980s and 90s. He wrote about that in The Valley of The Butterflies, the fourth volume of his memoirs. You can see more on http://www.peterkinsley.com And here's a link to Peter's wild Ibiza days.
The words 'grand old man' and 'larger than life' are often overused but they apply to Maurice Druon, a writer, historian, war hero and defender-in-chief of the French language, who has died just short of his 91st birthday.
Druon's name does not mean much to the younger French generation, except perhaps as a bit of a reactionary and champion of linguistic purity at home and abroad. One of his last public acts was a quixotic campaign in 2007 to have the European Union adopt French as its supreme language in official documents.
But Druon is remembered by older people as a dashing man of action and letters and a patriot who packed more into his life than most can imagine. Le Figaro headlined its report today Un Seigneur des Lettres - A Lord of Letters. Druon's old-fashioned views infuriated the leftwing artistic world. As President Pompidou's Culture Minister after the 1968 uprising, he told theatre directors that they had to "choose between subsidies and petrol bombs."
Like many journalists, I knew Druon and found him charming, feisty and funny. Right up to this year he would come to the phone to chat about his pet causes. It was fascinating to hear his accounts -- sometimes in fluent old-fashioned English -- of working for General de Gaulle in London in the early 1940s.
He had fought the invading Germans in 1940 as a young cavalry officer before joining de Gaulle's Free French headquarters. In London he broadcast to the Resistance on the BBC's French service. He also penned, with his uncle, the words to the Chant des Partisans, the song that became the anthem for the internal Resistance against the Nazis and which lives on in the collective memory [listen to Yves Montand's version below]. It began "Friend, do you hear the crows' black flight over our plains?." This morning, Luc Chatel, the minister who acts as government spokesman said: "Like all French people, I get a kind of shiver when I hear the 'Chant des Partisans,''. Druon marked the second half of the 20th century, he marked the history of France."
Druon managed to win the Goncourt prize -- the top literary award -- at the age of 30 in 1948 and in the 1950s wrote a best-selling seven-volume romantic history called Les Rois Maudits. It was turned into a popular television series. He was elected the youngest member of the Académie Francaise -- the official guardian of the language -- in 1966 and went on to serve two decades as its "perpetual secretary", its boss.
He stuck to tradition and enjoyed provocation. In 1980, he deplored the election of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar as the first woman in the 374-year-old Académie, imagining female members "knitting during meetings on the dictionary." He conducted a cheeky but vain campaign five years ago to block the election of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former President and would-be literary figure, to the Academy.
In late 2007, Druon led the charge when Time magazine published a notorious article that proclaimed French culture to be dead. His defence of French as a world language was good-natured. He was no narrow-minded nationalist. As an Anglophile, he was appreciated as a raconteur at British embassy dinners. "I love English," he said recently, "though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power."
In his campaign to persuade Brussels to adopt French as its senior language, he argued that the tongue of Montesquieu was the supreme vehicle for civilised discourse. "Italian is the language of song, German is good for philosophy and English for poetry, French is best at precision, it has a rigour to it," he said.
President Sarkozy, whose liberties with the French language must have appalled Druon, paid tribute to him as "a great writer, a great resistant, a great political figure, a great wordsmith and a great spirit." Libération, the leftwing paper, paid him a typical back-handed compliment. "It's the death of an old reactionary who was, at heart, very respectable."
Nicolas Sarkozy's antics around the G20 summit have provided rich pickings for Nicolas Canteloup, the comedian who impersonates the President on Europe 1 radio every morning. Regulars on this blog do not need any introduction to Canteloup, but you might be interested in our two page profile of him today in T2, the feature section of the newspaper.
The piece is the fruit of the conversation at the Gare de Lyon that I mentioned here the other day. What made it topical was Canteloup's brilliant improvisation on Sarko after Jean-Pierre Elkkabach interviewed him live on Europe 1 yesterday morning [hear it here].Canteloup put his finger on the comic emptiness of Sarkozy's threat to leave an 'empty French chair' at the London summit -- an image that evokes a boycott of the European Community in 1965 by the late General de Gaulle.
"To simplify the empty chair... (We go to London), we have a snooze, eat and split," is how Canteloup's Sarko described his plans (That's an Americanized translation of . On va à Londres, on pionce, on dîne et on se casse." I used a British version in the article.) Today's Canteloup's "Sarko" said he was keeping his word in London. He summoned Bernard Laporte, the sports minister, and slapped him. "Voila, j'ai claqué la porte", he announced. The pun on the minister's name -- 'I've slammed the door '-- was a bit heavy but it worked.
The Canteloup article was a chance to write about the boom in political satire in France. On that subject, you might remember how Stéphane Guillon, Sarko's imitator on France-Inter radio, upset the president with his impertinence.As predicted here, Sarkozy has just made it known that he wants to dismiss Jean-Paul Cluzel, the boss of France-Inter and the other state radio networks. The President wants to replace him with Jean-Luc Hees, a safer pair of hands from Sarkozy's point of view, who has already been head of France-Inter. Sarko has the power to hire and fire the broadcast chiefs under a new law that he passed for himself, but he still needs endorsement by the CSA, the supposedly independent broadcasting authority. We shall see if they dare oppose him.
Sarkozy and his court have given birth to a comic industry. Here's the latest bande dessinée, or comic strip book, out today. The Sarkozys Run France is drawn by Luz, a political cartoonist who did well with an earlier Sarkozy book last year.
President Sarkozy has been at war with much of the intellectual world since he began running for the presidency so it is not surprising that anti-Sarko thinkers and teachers seize every chance to get at him. As France has celebrated its annual Week of the French Language, he has come under fire for verbal sloppiness and his fondness for talking like a regular guy.
Presidents of the French Republic are not supposed to start speeches by saying: "To everyone who's important here, bonjour."They also supposed to conjugate their verbs and use pronouns correctly. Sarkozy won the 2007 election playing fast and loose with the rigorous rules of the language but his failure to slip into the verbal mantle of the monarch is helping those who cast him as a Philistine.
The trouble, everyone will recall, began last year with "Casse-toi pauv'con" [Get lost, jerk], his admonition to a hostile bystander. It sounded coarse and unpresidential.
"Molière must be turning in his grave," le Parisien said on Sunday, reporting on the fuss over the latest Sarkozysmes, as his syntactical abuses are called. Fanny Capel, head of a campaign group called Sauvez les Lettres (Save Letters), told us: "We have un beauf at the head of the state." (Un beauf, or brother-in-law, stands for ordinary, opinionated and ignorant).
Sarkozy jangles purist nerves with colloquial tics such as dropping the "ne" between pronoun and verb in negative sentences. "J'écoute mais je tiens pas compte," he said the other day. (I listen but I don't take account.. It should have been je NE tiens pas...) He often uses the slangy "ch'ais pas" for "je ne sais pas" and "ch'uis" instead of "je suis" and he throws the intimate "tu" around with abandon. It's not just friendliness. Eschewing the formal vous is a way of intimidating people, say those have had dealings with Sarko.
Defending an income tax ceiling last week, he told factory workers: "Si y en a que ça les démange d'augmenter les impôts..." A London equivalent might be be "If there's anyone 'ere that's itching to put up taxes..." [I'm sure people can suggest better versions]
Like Tony Blair and his pseudo estuary-speak, Sarkozy is a lawyer and rhetorical ace who uses low-class tones as a way of sounding like an ordinary bloke. The style grates because of France's attachment to language as a unifying symbol of the Republic. Most previous leaders have cultivated a literary side, including military ones such as Charles de Gaulle and Napoleon Bonaparte. The President is being accused of setting a poor example when he is trying to stem the decline in literacy. Jean-Marie Rouart, a distinguished writer and member of the Académie Française, accused Sarkozy of pandering to youth "by apeing their vulgarity".
Jean Veronis, who wrote a study called "The Words of Nicolas Sarkozy," said that the President's speech was natural to him. "He is not very cultivated and does not read much. Usually politicians correct themselves when they arrive at a certain level, but Sarkozy does not give a hoot. It's his nouveau riche attitude," Veronis told us.
Capel says that Sarkozy's "virile and brutal" language "shocks the working classes most of all because they still believe that they can rise in the world through education." In Le Monde this month, Barbara Cassin, a philosopher and philologist, accused Sarkozy of undermining democracy with his loose grammar. "Every time that President Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs agree," she said. "That is the best, and only respectful way..." Cassin was shocked "by the spelling mistakes which litter the website of the Elysée palace." These would be amusing "if they did not testify to a worrying off-handed attitude towards culture," she said.
 [Left: Sarkozy chose the palace library for his first official portrait]
Sarkozy's image as a Philistine has not been diminished by recent attempts by Carla Bruni to depict him as a closet lover of belles lettres and fan of antique philosophers. The President has published his memoirs and political texts as well as a biography but, a little like George W. Bush, he plays up his uncultivated side.
One of his favourite targets, as we've seen here before, is a 17th century novel called The Princess of Cleves. He suffered from the book, by Madame de Lafayette, in his school years and loves mocking it as an example of cultural baggage that is irrelevant for most people in modern France. He joked recently that only a "sadist or an idiot" could have inserted questions on the book into an entrance examination for civil servants. (Sarkozy has removed the culture test from that exam). The book has now sold out. Protesters are staging public readings and visitors at the Paris book fair last week were wearing badges saying "I am reading the Princess of Cleves."
 Michelin published the 100th edition of its Red Guide today. That prompted the annual ritual of bashing the celebrated bible of French gastronomy. The guide, first published in 1900 but halted during world wars, has lost touch with modern taste and rewards "museum-cuisine" in the stuffy old French tradition, say the critics.
The only addition to the élite three-star category, Eric Fréchon of the Hotel Bristol in Paris [below], is coming in for his own share of sniping. The Bristol, across the street from the Elysée Palace, is President Sarkozy's favourite "cantine", so Fréchon's promotion is being called a marketing stunt. In an amusing video, the ferocious François Simon of le Figaro visits the Bristol and calls his cooking overdone, too expensive and not very original. Simon's bill for a meal for two came to 531 euros.
For the British, the other noteworthy promotion was the two-star rating awarded to Gordon Ramsay, the British celebrity chef, for the restaurant which he took over at the Trianon Palace hotel in Versailles a year ago. Simon of course had a put-down for the upstart Britannique. Ramsay's cooking is not bad though déjà vu and unoriginal, said Simon.
But for an institution that is so often proclaimed passé, Michelin is not doing badly. The 2,000-page Red Guide sells 1.3 million copies a year worldwide. In France it sold 370,000 in 2008 -- ten times more than its nearest competitor, the Gault et Millau guide. That's impressive for a publication that sticks to its tradition of packing a single volume with tiny print, minimalist description and no pictures.
A series of great chefs have withdrawn in recent years from the struggle of meeting Michelin's exacting standards in order to keep their stars. The latest of these was Marc Veyrat, one of the super-stars of the culinary world, who said last week that he is giving up his restaurant at Annecy, in the Alps.
But for thousands of aspiring chefs, Michelin and its feared but small team of anonymous inspectors, remains the ultimate arbiter. In a sign of the times, the French guide is now under the command of Juliane Caspar, 38, a German from Cologne. Jean-Luc Naret, director of all the guides, has been making his case for the superiority of the Guide Rouge. "We have no competitor in France or internationally," he said. Michelin went intercontinental in 2005 with a New York edition and has since opened in Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The tyre-making Michelin brothers put out their first guide free to help travellers and their chauffeurs in the new-fangled automobiles to find mechanics and places to sleep and eat [1920 version in picture was first paid edition]. With its maps, guides and recently GPS brand, the firm has remained a reliable source of information for travellers in France. The Red Guide is now available on the internet and as an iPhone application. The next step is a GPS service that will list nearby Michelin recommendations automatically on your sat-nav mobile phone.
We have been given more evidence that France, despite its reputation for rigorous schooling, is no exception to the decline of literacy.
A teachers' campaign group gave a 1976 spelling and grammar test to a sample of 1,348 kids who began lycée -- high-school -- last autumn. Only 14 percent of the 15-year-olds could scrape beyond the 50 percent mark. Fifty-eight percent scored zero. When they set the identical 1976 test in 2000, 30 percent passed.
As a father of two teenagers who have done all their schooling in the French system, my first reaction was to blame the harsh marking methods. My daughter, who starts lycée next autumn, has often come home with copies of the dreaded dictée (dictation) in which she has 0/20. A few forgotten accents quickly pull down the marks. The children are also held to high standards on the rules of grammar. But I took a closer look and found that the dictation text and the related questions were not really very tough in the 1976 test, which was from the brevet -- the certificate needed to qualify for the lycée. [See dictation text below]
Commenting on the findings, the Sauvez-les-lettres group said the results showed a disastrous collapse in comprehension and grasp of the language. It is not just a case of the notoriously tricky spelling of French, with all those accents and unpronounced letters. After eight years of school, half the 15-year-olds could not recognize a simple adverb or the direct object of a verb. That might sound complicated in countries where grammar is not taught, but these things are dinned into French children from from the start.
President Sarkozy's government is trying, like its predecessors, to stem the slide in basic skills. Its reforms to the huge centrally-controlled education system are largely opposed by teachers' unions, a group that have fought just about every change for the past 30 years. School hours have recently been cut for primary schools, with most pupils doing a four-day week and special remedial classes for the poorest performers.
The Sauvez-les-lettres group says that this will not help. The answer is to go back to teaching French in the old fashioned way and for as many hours as it was taught in 1976, they say. That seems unlikely to happen.
The decline in language skills is worrying France as much as anywhere else. Employers say that job applications from university graduates are often riddled with basic language mistakes. Another depressing account of the problem has just been produced by Danièle Sallenave, a novelist. She spent time in two collèges -- junior secondary schools -- and wrote up her experience in Nous, on n'aime pas lire (We don't like reading).
Even parents with good education read few books, so it is not surprising that their children do not, she says. "There are even people from the elite classes who boast that they don't read," she told le Monde. "If you don't read regularly, you forget how to...The word 'culture' nowadays, has come to mean the national heritage and its use for commercial and tourist ends. That is not what people need."
After spending time in the schools, one private and affluent and the other poor, she concludes that "our schools exist in a society which no longer believes in the power of art or words."
-----------
Here's the dictée of 1976. Note: there are no subjunctives or pesky participles with avoir. For the subsequent questions go here.
L’atelier 76.
Gilles ouvrit le battant d’une lourde porte et me laissa le passage. Je m’arrêtai et le regardai. Il dit quelque chose, mais je ne pouvais plus l’entendre, j’étais dans l’atelier 76.
Les machines, les marteaux, les outils, les moteurs de la chaîne, les scies mêlaient leurs bruits infernaux et ce vacarme insupportable, fait de grondements, de sifflements, de sons aigus, déchirants pour l’oreille, me sembla tellement inhumain que je crus qu’il s’agissait d’un accident, que ces bruits ne s’accordant pas ensemble, certains allaient cesser. Gilles vit mon étonnement.
- C’est le bruit, cria-t-il dans mon oreille.
Il n’en paraissait pas gêné. L’atelier 76 était immense. Nous avançâmes, enjambant des chariots et des caisses, et quand nous arrivâmes devant les rangées des machines où travaillaient un grand nombre d’hommes, un hurlement s’éleva, se prolongea, repris, me sembla-t-il, par tous les ouvriers de l’atelier.
Gilles sourit et se pencha vers moi.
- N’ayez pas peur. C’est pour vous. Chaque fois qu’une femme rentre ici, c’est comme ça.
Je baissai la tête et marchai, accompagnée par cette espèce de “ Ah ! ” rugissant qui s’élevait maintenant de partout.
A ma droite, un serpent de voitures avançait lentement, mais je n’osais regarder.
Claire Etcherelli, Elise ou la vraie vie.
Do we really need to know all about the rather cheesy chat-up that Nicolas Sarkozy performed on the night that he met Carla Bruni? The French media apparently think that we, or at least the French people, do not.
A lurid and fascinating account of the famous dinner party of November 2007 has just been published by its host, Jacques Séguéla. If we are to believe Séguéla, the doyen of the French advertising world, Sarko went for Bruni like a boastful teenager on speed. He proposed marriage that night, mocked Mick Jagger, one of her former lovers, and bragged that he would make her Marilyn Monroe to his Jack Kennedy.
Click here for the full account from today's Times. My point here is the near silence so far in the French media. Séguéla, 77, has been interviewed on the radio about his book, called Autobiographie Non Autorisée, a series of portraits of people he knows. But very little has so far surfaced on the extraordinary mating dance performed by Sarko and the woman who became France's first lady seven weeks later. Almost the only French-speaking media to report the tale until now are the Swiss and Belgian. In her excellent press review on RTL radio -- the top-rated station -- Pascale Clark advised listeners to go to a Swiss newspaper site if they wanted to know about Séguéla's yarn.
The silence reflects the usual reluctance by the media -- reinforced by the law -- to touch matters of private life and especially of those in power. But Séguéla has published his account and presumably did so with some consent from the two friends whom he invited on a blind date in his home.
You can argue that conversations between the President and the woman for whom he fell are of no public concern. Perhaps Séguéla is betraying confidences -- or reporting inaccurately. But once he published his transcript of the less than witty badinage between the pair, it's impossible to deny the interest.
Séguéla calls the encounter a meeting of two mighty Shakespearian characters. The Great Dinner Romance does not quite sound like that but it gives intriguing insight into the psychology of Europe's most powerful leader (in the sense that no other is head of state and absolute chief executive). Sarkozy comes over as impetuous and thrilled with himself -- qualities with which France is well acquainted. The dinner party was originally planned as an attempt to reconcile Sarko with Cécilia, his restive wife. Bruni was invited to meet Sarko after Cécilia walked out and divorced him. Without venturing into amateur psychology, Sarkozy's behaviour looks like a classic case of rebound.
There was no room in the news article for an angle that emerges from Séguéla's account of the evening: the confirmation of Sarkozy's obsession with the United States. His desire to see himself as JFK is a constant. When he was elected, he saw the Elysée Palace as a new Kennedy Camelot, telling journalists that Cécilia looked like Jackie Kennedy.
Sarkozy has lately turned against the Americans, blaming them, or at least their bankers, for corrupting capitalism and bringing down the world economy. But in November 2007, Sarkozy had just come back from a visit to the White House and the love affair was in full bloom.
Here is what Sarkozy told the dinner guests about his state banquet at President Bush's place, according to Seguela.
It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life. My entrance up the steps of the White House, surrounded by three women who are symbols of a France that America was not expecting: what pride! I took care of every detail. I told Rama Yade (young, black Minister for Human Rights) that she was too beautiful to put on one of those dresses with fussy frills that she goes in for. I told Rachida (Dati, Justice Minister, of Arab origin) to stick with her usual Dior elegance. I told Christine (Lagarde, Finance Minister) to leave her jewels in the safe. A Minister of Finance does not greet the American President in a pearl necklace.
A final point: The failure of the French media to pick up this tale is part of the same taboo that was applied last month to my interview with Julie Imperiali, Sarkozy and Bruni's fitness coach. Her account of working out with Sarko was replayed -- and usually distorted -- everywhere else, but not in France. There are some things that the people do not need to know about the President of the Republic.
President Sarkozy is going on television tonight to try to convince a sceptical country that he is doing enough to handle the economic crisis. He is not expected to shift course or announce anything. But for some in the political world, the main point may be what he says about Bernard Kouchner.
Sarkozy's Foreign Minister, who made his name decades ago as a crusading activist for human rights, is at the centre of a storm over allegations of sleazy behaviour. The fuss has been created by a book that takes an axe to Dr Kouchner's reputation as a dashing apostle of noble causes. It depicts him as an agent of US interests and a France-hater. The allegation of sleaze stems from details of work that Kouchner performed as a consultant for Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon for the last 40 years [picture below] and other less-than-savoury African leaders. That was before Sarkozy recruited him to his new government in 2007 as his prize catch from the left. [My Kouchner profile here]
Kouchner, 69, says that the "The World According to K"by Pierre Péan, is a a pile of nauseating nonsense. He denies any conflicts of interest or impropriety and depicts himself as the victim of a malicious attempt to destroy his name. He says that his consulting work was legitimate and led to a big improvement in health services for poor Africans. François Fillon, the Prime Minister, has rallied to his side, but so far Sarkozy has said nothing. The President does not get along well with his ageing rock star of a Foreign Minister and there are suggestions that his staff may even have had a hand in the book.
Here's the story from today's Times, but it's worth expanding on its seamy side. So far we have only seen extracts from the book, but they are enough to raise questions about the intent of Pierre Péan. His attack on Kouchner carries a whiff of anti-semitism and a poisonous tone that reminds one of the xenophobia of the old French far right.
Péan has made a career as a hard-hitting investigative journalist. He has delivered some scoops, such as the revelation in 1994 that the then President Mitterrand had held a senior job in the wartime Vichy régime.Le Monde newspaper has not yet recovered from a damaging investigation of its methods that he co-wrote five years ago.
Péan's pedigree explains why his Kouchner book carries weight. But Pean writes in an opinionated, often brutal way. He has hobby horses, one of which is the Rwanda. His last book turned history on its head, arguing that Tutsi leaders and not the French-backed Hutu were behind the 1994 genocide of 800,000 Tutsis.
Péan discredits his indictment of Kouchner by painting him as a money-mad outsider whose primary motivation springs from his Jewish origins. Kouchner is driven, he says, by "hatred for the values of the French Revolution, of the wartime Resistance, of a national independence that is loathed in the name of an Anglo-Saxon cosmopolitanism...". The Foreign Minister is guilty of "selling out French interests" to the United States and of hating himself as well as France.
That is odious stuff, the kind of language that was used against Jews and other supposed enemies of France in the Dreyfus affair of the late 1890s and by the hard right in the years up to 1945. Even Jean-Marie Le Pen, the sulphurous boss of the far-right National Front, would think twice before using the old anti-semitic codeword "cosmopolitan".
Kouchner was right to call this sickening and I'm pleased to see that a few commentators have come round to the same view.Le Monde has just denounced Péan's language as a loathsome "cocktail of qualifiers used by a certain French right wing". Jean-Michel Aphatie, one of the sharpest political commentators, has written a blog post pointing out Péan's apparent anti-semitism.
The minister may be helped by the sinister tone of Péan's book because it distracts attention from his consulting work for regimes with records far removed from the moral causes that he has always promoted. Everyone knows that Kouchner is a bit of a showman with a prima donna side. Péan's book does not seem to reveal any facts that were not already known about the minister. He will no doubt survive in his job, for a while at least.
Anyone who doubts that Ségolène Royal is a little nutty should take a look at a new book in which she settles scores in a vindictive way with her friends and foes and notably Nicolas Sarkozy.
In "Femme Debout" (Woman Standing or Upright Woman) the Socialist party star paints a venomous portrait of Sarkozy, who beat her in the 2007 presidential election. She calls him a childish, greedy, lying, cynical exhibitionist.
Judging from excerpts, Royal's book, a series of conversations with a journalist, suggests that France was lucky to have escaped the rule of a rather strange politician. The former presidential candidate is convinced that she is the target of systematic persecution. She does not believe that she lost the narrow vote for the party leadership to Martine Aubry last month. . "I continue to think that I hold the majority," she says. She fell victim, she says, to a plot by party elders that was "a form of absolute perversion."
Royal is convinced that she has been anointed by some mystical force and that she is the best candidate to lead the party into 2012 presidential election. "If there was a better one than me, let him or her stand up...For the moment, I see none."
She claims that she is the victim of hatred and jealousy in the party. She quotes the view of the rest of the leadership. "I am completely awful...Mon Dieu, quelle horreur, cette femme est dangereuse, c'est une sorcière... (...that woman is dangerous, she's a witch)."
Her portrait of Sarkozy contains some true touches, especially on his child-like, exhibitionist side. But it is so excessive that you can understand why the President hopes that she will come back for a rematch in 2012. Here's a taste:
What bothers me most about him is his immorality. ..He does not hide his greed, his bulimia for money, for sensuality and pleasure. He has a form of extreme cynicism, like a teenager who wants to dazzle the entire planet.
He has the talent of of a liar. ... If it had been an American campaign, everything would have come out, all his lack of morality...Sarkozy is an immense lie, an impostor.
When Sarkozy received me at the Elysée Palace just after the defeat, I found him quite mediocre in his behaviour. There was no hauteur, élan or fair play. ... He just stood there, shuffling around, offering me chocolates, trying to get me to talk about my separation from François Hollande (her former partner and party leader), trashing journalists, showing off his watch and telling me that he could have been making loads of cash if he had another job.
He is a lot more dull that you would think. His energy is impressive but it's all showing off. .. He is a little boy thrilled with his new toys. With his little sheriff's star and his plastic gun, his cowboy outfit, he is the kid who won the prize on the merry-go-round.
The book, put together by Françoise Degois of radio France-Inter, is out next week and excerpted in today's Nouvel Observateur. Given the vitriol that she dumps on her colleagues, it is just as well that Royal has taken off to Brazil for the week. She decided to stay away from today's big anti-Sarkozy marches, in which France's biggest leftwing party is trying to win back some credibility with the working classes who deserted it. More on that later...
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Bless you, DO-RE-MI, and a Very Happy New Year. Second-raters scoff at the polysyllables of the knowledgeable – that’s my excuse.
Posted by: Rick | 2 Jan 2010 19:15:54
LEX,
Alexandre Dumas was very prescient - see what happened yesterday in Denmark - crazy!
If you are interested in details about A. Dumas, you may have a look at the following link. Per pure coincidence, Le Point just published an interview of the historian Simone Bertière who wrote a book about Dumas.
http://www.lepoint.fr/culture/2010-01-01/interview-enquete-sur-les-trois-mousquetaires/249/0/409796
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 2 Jan 2010 18:20:34
BLENDI,
"A tired wife = a less demanding, nagging wife"
LOL - but experience shows that this is not always true :)
Happy to see you back on the blog !
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 2 Jan 2010 17:43:59
DOMINIQUE II,
Bonne année à vous et à tous nos correspondants sur le site et bien sûr, à CHARLES !
Dans l'arsenal des expressions politiciennes amusantes (plus ou moins :), je ne connaissais pas non plus "economic with the truth"...
Dans un autre registre, cela me fait penser à ce que disait quelquefois mon amie de cœur des années 60 : "J'ai la conscience élastique" - en fait, comparé à ce qui se passe maintenant, c'était une conscience parfaitement policée :).
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 2 Jan 2010 17:40:50
now we fill wrinkles instead of sanding them down.
DO RE MI
That's History repeating itself - remember all those old jokes about Polyfilla?
Anyway there's only so much fluffing out of wrinkles you can do before you look like a hamster :)
The trick (well, one of them), is to (try to) keep smiling.
I hope 2010 allows you to do just that.
Posted by: dot king | 2 Jan 2010 16:47:46
Dot "Most ordinary people (ie living inside "the envelope" :)) don't have salaries as high as that and would be very pleased indeed to have that sort of income."
..but it doesn't help people to build businesses that may someday employ other people... higher revenue is needed at which point the full force of French tax/social security hits...
Posted by: FC | 2 Jan 2010 16:17:11
Blendi Progri
Your english is tanking
Posted by: rocket | 2 Jan 2010 15:47:09
Dot
"Most ordinary people (ie living inside "the envelope" :)) don't have salaries as high as that and would be very pleased indeed to have that sort of income."
That shows the weakness of the current French economy.
I'm not knocking lower income people as some years I am one of them but when you set the bar so low as 32K€ before taxes you end up with mediocrity and you inhibit people to take the next step which is to enter into the high taxation system
Posted by: rocket | 2 Jan 2010 15:40:54
Don’t make me laugh, my head hurts.
Rick happy new year to you and that was very funny.
I have never liked acid. I might have sounded like I was on a trip but Azloon knows what I was on about.
Rick, Richard Jones, Azloon,
You guys don’t read women’s mags but Hyaluronic acid now the new wonder thing for wrinkles, holds water and plums up the skin. Last year we (women) were encouraged to strip our face of various layers with power sanders but now it’s over, now we fill wrinkles instead of sanding them down.
Until the next craze. Just check out the mad thing that is happening to mascaras, they are "telescopic" and "they buzz".
Dot
Thanks.
Well her name sounds like Tease and she is into Burlesque. When she does books signing the majority of people in the queue are women. I guess guys are at home on their pc for the hard stuff.
Her type and Mrs BHL don’t do reality. I guess it’s like photos by Helmut Newton, naked thin women = art, naked fat women = porn.
Azloon
Very funny lol.
It’s 2010 still feels like 2009 still. The new year will start when the first resolution gets broken.
Posted by: do-re-mi | 2 Jan 2010 15:01:39
Leaders like Sarko don’t come often. If he quits, it will be a shame.
My theory on France troubles is simple. Sarko has been spending too much time in there.
He must follow his destiny, go abroad, engage with the world at large, summits, rescue hostages, mend broken countries and fix–deal in big time diplomacy.
Supposed benefits:
• France [if left alone] runs itself better.
• Carla travels. Travel tires one. A tired wife = a less demanding, nagging wife. i.e Sarko/ France calmer. Relaxed.
• Sarko happier. Somehow Frances problems tire the guy. He is at his happiest abroad, of course as President of France. We must agree that the idea that a President must stay on his own country is old fashioned in the XXI century. *
• Will it hurt anyone if air miles are collected?
• Why there isn’t a Presidents Farm. All of them, in one place, free fun, food and travel. Top notch security, all day meetings and diplomacy, golf etc…These guys have a tough life in own countries. And to teach them manners and how to behave in general, some lessons from good ol Queen Beth the 2-nd.
I guarantee that all countries will run better, faster too.
Anyhow, at any rate one guy deserves to be abroad more than anyone, that one is Sarko, give the guy a break- I say- at least 3-4 year one.
Sorry France, but theres too much of him on you, and too little of him to go around the world. No time to waste.
---
As for world economy, hm, it doesn’t seem that good, hope it gets better with time.
One concept, we all forget is time! ...wanting things here and now, time heals all things…wait and see, give it time, take your time, this is what Economists should calculate, long term. Though…JMK ssaid once, in Long Term We Are All Dead…so no fix then?
Ok, lets spend & spend and suffer consequences. No choice as Al Greenspun said. The dollar is Green.
& a Happy Easter too all men.
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 2 Jan 2010 13:20:07
Thank you CB for your informative, perceptive and amusing commentaries on all aspects of French life, I look forward to many more throughout 2010.
Happy New Year from St Ouen.
[Thanks Nick. Happy New Year. I just drove through Saint Ouen. CB]
Posted by: Nick Moore | 2 Jan 2010 13:17:24
AZLOON,
Latest Gallup tracking poll has Obama at 51% approval (-2). They say on their website that they will not publish daily poll on Friday the 1st or Sat. the 2nd.
Posted by: MCD | 2 Jan 2010 13:15:29
I dashur Azloon,
Falemiderit per urimet dhe deshiroj nje vit te lumtur e te begate per Ju e familjen tuaj.
Gezuar Vitint e Ri 2010, Shendet, Fat e Miresi.
[thnx for the wishes and I wish a joyful year for you and your family.
Happy New Year, Health, Luck and Goodness all year around.]
Your message is eerily right, [if I was pedantic very few letters are missing, lol] and either Google is scarily improving in small languages or you got some Albo friends now…or…you are learning that yourself. Knowing you
a little, that aint far-fetched : ) : )
Having one Albanologist in the Blog, from the detached and calm perspective of Arizona plains [lol] can do this esteemed blog no harm.
Indeed may enrich it.
Am pleased to see and read from many old names and young ones too, the blog is great as ever.
I wish–at times-to be more free, work less hard and spend time at leisure.
Gosh, how much I envy the Pensioners.
[no, not imitating posh, just doing a bumbling Hugh Grant impersonation..oh golly...oh what a silly me...hmm, love Hugh btw]
Freedom of thought, speech and movement : )
Having to plan everything, deadlines and not to mention supporting two lil, never-happy, monstrously demanding horrors, its agein me before my time : )
Now am beyond survival stage, we are at the point where X-box or PS3 are a must have and a game costs 40 GBP… phew…when I buy shoes that cost 30 GBP I think few months, and even then, I don’t buy them.
Well, I don’t go shoeless as my wife buys them for me anyhow, but I feel guilt, hm £40? Shoes?. Then, we buy more Games, none of which I know how to play.
One exeption though, is an interesting un, called Guitar Hero, tried it yesterday [inspired by new year concerto] though hm…classic is good let me try some rock and roll…. Jumped into Eye of the Tiger, my son a guitar, me on mike…well in first verse computer booted me off. LOL.
Booted by a computer [the so called X-box] Anyway, it promises to be a hectic year. London is cold, people have disappeared, this holiday was too long, way too long.
Maybe the folks are all shopping, one activity I don’t miss nor do I engage in. Hope you will try Guitar Hero, its good and addictive, pushing some buttons that aren’t real gives one the feeling he knows how to play guitar. Lol, even I could do that, singing though – very bad. Since the computer said so, I am now afraid to sing even in the shower. : (
____/
Descartes' bones shakes in his grave.
[From Smokin' Baby Boomer Mom]
Nice line Mom, also about BHL.
I thought since time of Socrates, Philosophers were mainly amateurs, and very few were called-deserved to be called that.
My thinking is that a Philosopher is someone that is dead by at least 50 years. Living ones are just dabbling on it or teaching it, or know not what they are doing.
Schopenhauer said also – I am not afraid of death but of Philosophy professors picking on my work after I die. [ more or less]
My fav French guy on this field has to be Montaigne, what a dude... he read, wrote, hmm at leisure, sleep, read, stay in, read some more...what a life.
What a guy!
call him lazy if you dare...
__________/
Polansky, again, its not a very nice guy.
-------------/
This year has been a lil hard too, feeling sorry for USA [a hard thing to do, especially by a lil guy] with all that money lost, I hope this year someone can find it, if not teh whole amount, at least some of it : )
Joys of technology.
____________________
Two lil horrors on the same sofa. Both concentrated and not speaking to each other, nerly touching, heads bowed, writing furiosly. On two small mchines called Nintendo DS.
I came try to join in with my old tech- called TALKING...[poor me]
@ child 2 -how is it going?
- Dad stop it I am talking to Him [to child 1]
Me- What?
Child 2, yes we connect two nintendos and chat, now please dont interrupt.
Dont know what came over me...and I just shouted;
-Hey...[child's 1 Name] a bit loud [to be fair, lol]
Both looked to me as I was mad!
-People [me at lil people] Chating is done by mouth, only mad ones chat on machines when on the same sofa.
Well?
Both rolled their eyes and back to their 'fun'
As i said joys of technology...
I wonder what year 2110 will be...?
No dads at all?!
Or dads on a computer? That will be wicked, every child can adjust their dad as they please, or delete him and make another one.
Viva progress.
but I wont be there to see it, hopefully. Say hopefully as some mad nutters are ding research on how to keep people alive forever.
Imagine that! Then the software will be a nightmare...everyone from microsfot-ps-sony, nintendo etc,can release a new programable Dad 3.0
Upgrage your father, upload a new & improved Mother.
Get updates on your family and change them to new releases.
Eh the fun.
***
One day I am gonna leave this planet poorer than I did find it. This is a serious thought, one I can't escape from. Help!
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 2 Jan 2010 12:47:56
The "entrepreneur individual" status has set low limits on what people can earn with low taxation.
ROCKET
I think you mean the "Auto-entrepreneur" aka "Micro-entreprise". it might seem like peanuts to a US citizen living "outside the envelope" in France, but in fact the ceilings for these two business status are as follows:
For commercial or artisanal businesses €32.000 p a, and for services (ie anything overseen by the URSSAF and not the CCI) €28.000 p a. The first case gives a monthly gross income possible of €2600 and the second €2300.
Most ordinary people (ie living inside "the envelope" :)) don't have salaries as high as that and would be very pleased indeed to have that sort of income.
So the new business régimes that you call low-earning are in fact decent standards of income, and the taxation rate on them is just over 23% on profits. They are liable for Taxe Professionnelle too and that is on the CA, but is 6% - as for all businesses - allowing for the confusion reigning at present as to whether it's being abolished or not.
Posted by: dot king | 2 Jan 2010 12:09:45
‘What prevents French mainstream opinion from joining in the AS fox hunt on Polanski's track is a painfully obvious lack of fairness of the "judicial process" he's been fleeing.’ [DOMINIQUE II]
Or might it be that the talented Mr Polanski is putting the final touches to a film – ‘The Ghost’ – about the blessèd Anthony Blair of Yore? I put it to you DOMINIQUE that, in this piece of ‘faction’ – produced by the Babelsberg Studios of Berlin (which have a skeleton or two of their own in their cupboards) – resides a worse case of deceit than your own fancies on the ‘painfully obvious lack of fairness of the "judicial process" he's been fleeing’.
To repeat, in the remote eventuality that Roman Polanski IS indeed receiving less than his due of fairness he, Polanski, may justly reflect on the treatment that he himself is meting out to the over-hasty, over-sure Tony Blair. This last-mentioned may suffer from a surfeit of sanctity, self-satisfaction, and inner certainty – but short-arsed abuser of the casting-couch he most certainly is not!
So automatic, so reflex, so blind to the many and manifest shortcomings of French ‘judicial process’ is your non-presumption of innocence where California is concerned, you may justly be called ‘Blairian’ in your heart-on-sleeve certainty! You didn’t so much ‘rush to judgement’ as nose-dive there... without a flipping parachute.
Whence this knee-jerk ‘coup de pied’ at Le Yank? Whence this thinking the worse? I tentatively suggest that you need look little further than into to the short (even shorter than America’s!) history of France. You see, cynicism is endemic in the young nations of Europe’s Mediterranean fringe. In such countries as Italy, Spain, and France, there lingers – raw and shaming – the memory of feudal and religious overlordship, the peasant predicament.
What few rights the peasantry possessed were group rights. What few thoughts the peasants enunciated were group-thoughts. Thus, your atavistic leap of unfaith – of cheap cynicism – that ‘they’ (the Californian judiciary) simply had to be behaving with the same highhandedness as ‘monsieur le baron d’Autrefois’. Some call this ‘peasant cunning’. It’s an automatic and group phenomenon and you see quite a lot of it in France. Think of those bosses locked in their office... Think of those Jacqueries of car-burners...
Posted by: Rick | 2 Jan 2010 10:19:20
Happy new year to you and the family Charles.....
[Thank you RJB. And to you too CB]
Posted by: RjBingham | 2 Jan 2010 09:15:43
Bonne année Daniel - in my experience "creative accounting" carries a darker meaning than merely "creating wealth out of nothing"; it alludes to fraud, like "economic with the truth" refers to sheer lies.
Of course creativity in accountants, and creative accounting in investment banking aka defrauding customers, have to be repressed - even if it means the Heritage Foundation throws another tantrum about economic freedom.
Posted by: Dominique II | 2 Jan 2010 08:29:46
ROCKET,
"We'll find out"
Obviously, there are many things which could (or should) be improved in France. However, the US are definitely not in a position to teach lessons to others in economic matters, at least if one relies upon the judgement of my favourite Nobel price laureate in economics, Mr. Krugman (Mr. Krugman is US American, not French - furthermore, HE lives full time in the US :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/28/opinion/28krugman.html?_r=1&em
PS:
May be he should be called Mr.Klugman - in German, "klug" means intelligent, smart :)
In Mr. Krugman's article, I learned a pregnant expression i.e. "creative accounting" - this is indeed a good American translation of "making gold out of nothing" (Mr. Köhler, German President and former head of the International Monetary Fund).
BTW, some AS are very good in (pompous :) litotes coining - i.e. creative accounting, quantitative easing...
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 1 Jan 2010 23:23:00
"If he was in Poland and has a family and acquaintances who lived in the Communist years, he is certainly more qualified than us to speak about socialism."
ROCKET, a twenty-years old ideologue who obviously never left Poland, or did so with a self-imposed blindfold, is not qualified to speak about what we French, and indeeed most of Western Europe, call, and practice as, Socialism when Socialists are in power - which is not the case right now.
Bending reality to prejudice is a common failure of ideologues, but you cannot claim the same extenuating circumstances ZBIG can - youth and parochiality.
Posted by: Dominique II | 1 Jan 2010 21:43:46
Happy New Year Maggie
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 21:26:13
That was just a dumb spontaneous reaction / experiment. I really meant Happy New Year to everyone on the blog.
Posted by: Maggie | 1 Jan 2010 21:09:39
Happy New Year, Rocket.
Posted by: Maggie | 1 Jan 2010 20:47:40
Charles:
A little beauty to start the new year:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YKBrUqwIU&feature=PlayList&p=1D734F169E0D593D&index=23
Best wishes, Bob
Posted by: Colorado Bob | 1 Jan 2010 20:18:17
when i say "bye les anglais"
ans when i say... from paris
it was a joke !
happy new year !
Posted by: karmadeloco | 1 Jan 2010 20:13:41
This one goes to "MADS" who posted on Dec.28/09.
I am French and you do not need to apologize to me.
BHL is most certainly a French POSEUR ( not Penseur ).
Any time he is referred to as a "Philosopher" my skin crawls and Descartes' bones rattle in his grave.
As for Polanski, he is and always will be a child rapist.
Vive la "sanity" !
Posted by: Smokin' Baby Boomer Mom | 1 Jan 2010 20:02:30
This one goes to "MADS" ( who posted on Dec 28 ).
I am French and you do not need to apologize to me !
Bernard Henri Lévy IS a definite poseur.
Every time he is called a "philosopher" my skin crawls and Descartes' bones shakes in his grave.
As for Polanski, he is a child rapist.
Period.
Posted by: Smokin' Baby Boomer Mom | 1 Jan 2010 19:52:28
Thank you Leo for taking the time to wish me a Happy New Year.
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 19:50:37
Rick
‘I'm a conservative journalist, blogger, ideologue and defense analyst. I was born on 5th Dec 1988.’ [Zbigniew M. Mazurak]
If he was in Poland and has a family and acquaintances who lived in the Communist years, he is certainly more qualified than us to speak about socialism.
CB. I would love to hear your take on how a constant unemployment rate of 7% even in the best of times can qualify an economy as a model and not a missed opportunity.
also you said
"his hard line on law and order."
http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2010/01/01/01016-20100101ARTFIG00019-une-nuit-de-la-saint-sylvestre-plutot-calme-.php
"plutot calme" for France!
"Car la nuit de la Saint Sylvestre «s'est bien déroulée sur l'ensemble du territoire national», a constaté vendredi le ministère de l'Intérieur"
"Selon le ministre de l'Intérieur, Brice Hortefeux, 1.137 voitures ont été brûlées, contre 1.147 un an plus tôt"
I heard a difference of 30 cars lower than last year on France Info.
I don't see any improvement in law and order and especially crimes involving firearms.
Daniel
"I am afraid that VALENTIN will not be pleased to be called a socialist :)."
Valentine may be a very nice guy but no doubt his "rightist" ideas in France qualify him a left of center in my book. We'll find out when he finishes his six week winter vacation and try to catch him before he leaves on his two week vacation in Spring, just before the 2 month summer holiday following a two week medical leave for a common cold.
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 19:49:50
Blendi
Delighted to see you back here, your stream of consciousness as entertaining as ever.
Ju uroj ju dhe familjen tuaj një vit i gëzuar dhe të shëndetshme të reja (shpesh të njëjtën gjë).
Posted by: azloon | 1 Jan 2010 19:40:39
" is a painfully obvious lack of fairness of the "judicial process" he's been fleeing. " -- D2
Please elaborate on that a bit. I can't quite tell if you are expressing the French public opinion or your own opinion. At any rate, what is it that they or you perceive as the "obvious lack of fairness in the "judicial process.""
Posted by: Lex Stevens | 1 Jan 2010 18:28:04
"who can save France and the world!"
DAISY,
As far as I am able to recall, the gentleman who boasted not so long ago to have saved the world is a still acting foreign Prime Minister, not a still acting French
President :). Out of decency, I don't name the Prime Minister I am thinking of :).
ZBIGNIEW,
I am afraid that VALENTIN will not be pleased to be called a socialist :). I
Posted by: Daniel Strohl | 1 Jan 2010 17:22:00
CHARLES,
"'Fraid not, DODO, Rocket is a living and breathing person"
I guess you meant "living and kickin' "
Sorry about that Rocket. Happy New Year!
Posted by: Leo | 1 Jan 2010 17:13:12
I think the chances of Sarkozy not running for presidential office again are as close to nil as you can get. Power is addictive. Even a wife that (he thinks) everyone else wants can't compete with power.
"Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end"
I can't advise Carlita to "get that ice, or else no dice" because she's already got plenty.
In any case, not running for president doesn't mean not holding on to the reins - Sarkozy admires political models from other countries and is big buddies with Putin.
(Just a thort :))
Posted by: dot king | 1 Jan 2010 16:49:37
TO RICK and DOT, (RICHARD J)
TO RICK AND RICHARD (see, I can create "items" too ;))
The first person to mention hyaluronic acid (I had to cut and paste that) was DoRe MI, not Dore-ME.
Rick then did a very clever pun on it and was generously complimented upon aforementioned pun by my goodself, but that is no reason to match-make us . . :)
I suspect a sheep's bladder too many might have been consumed.
Good start to 2010 - may it continue.
A happy one to both of you.
PS to all, if this or something similar appears twice, it's because I think I switched columns before posting my first effort, you aren't (still) seeing double! ;D
Posted by: dot king | 1 Jan 2010 16:40:58
TO RICK AND RICHARD (see, I can create "items" too :))
The original user of that, hang on let's just copy and paste it, hyaluronic acid - there it is, was mentioned by DO RE MI, (not DO-RE ME) and thereafter was punned upon nicely by RICK who was generously complimented upon aforementioned pun by my goodself, but that is no reason to match-make us!
A sheep's bladder too many?
Jolly good start to 2010. ;D
Happy one to both.
Posted by: dot king | 1 Jan 2010 16:32:39
Now to Polanski, a crime is a crime is a crime. Rape is rape, for any women who says no and no…for us all too. With a child this is more aggravating. Is 13 a child or not, well it is emotionally and physically.
I think that countries must have some international agreements with regards to this and heinous crimes [murders etc] some qualifications must be made so no one in un-extraditable. No where. This guy should have done his time, then Movies, not the other way around. His ethnicity, tough life and traumas is no justification. This culture has brought us where we are today. For so long, so many of us have being delving so deeply in the psyche of Criminals [that’s what Polanski is to me–BTW] trying to understand what makes them do it…well hard-life, dad leaving, alcohol, violence during childhood etc But that cant be a justification. There are many who grew up in similar conditions and create a good & respectable life. The time has come that our own self-belief in our own libertarian values and tolerance and understanding…made us forget the Victims. Instead of making us more clever and open that makes us more impotent and that to me is just Pondering…nothing more. It has became self-defeating. Sometimes things are, cos they are. No explanations necessary, Punish the Criminal and Support the Victim.
And in cases the Victim says: I have forgiven them, fair to them, we the society still should follow the Laws and not give Oscars. What a travesty.
***
But I want to highlight the fact that this isn’t an isolated incident in the Movie, modeling, music industry. Many girls are used and abused and raped too [but how many go unreported?] for sake of being famous, false promises, pushed gradually into a life of despair, misery and exploitation- at a very early life. By own families[who should know better] and by unscrupulous Polanski’s and men like him. Same with the girl he Raped, her family trusted him but they should not have, still that cant lessen the crime.
The ‘faster’ this case is solved the better, hearing that guy’s name isn’t a pleasure at all.
Roman has slyly being painted ad ground-breaking genius that we must feel sorry for and by being on the run [what a virtue] he has suffered enough.[don’t ask how] As if for men of his ‘caliber’ mortal laws aren’t enough and eternity will punish us for being so mean. To me even as a director he isn’t all That, but don’t want to push this delicate topic towards his ‘artistic merits’ He is a famous guy, but more from fame and circumstances. Now infamous.
Punish him, lock the door. Throw the key away. Let the philosophers Ponder. Let life go on.
Oh, that and he is a COWARD TOO…from the moment of the act up to now. Why didn’t the silly-lil-dwarf try to rape a Big Woman, well cos she should have BEATEN HIM UP. That is why. Apologies to dwarfs.
Well done to Swiss for being fair, at least.
---
Polanksi? Punishment Long Due-I say with conviction. As a father, a man and human being.
A good idea for UN would be, if countries like USA [ some try to paint them as downtown Kabul] are that mean and unable to carry through a fair trial, why isnt an International Court [with own place-prisons] to judge cases as such till a world-wide extradition treaty has been established.
I wish UN becomes more practical and stop poncing about with 00 silly resolutions and wasting taxpayers money around the world.
UK has a case [ a train robber called Ronnie Bigsg] who lorded it over in Brazil for many years, becoming a celebrity and such... but the poor bugger came back again...
He couldnt afford to be buying homes in Swiss-land.
Utopia I now, but I think, no one should be able to hide, especially in democratic countries.
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 1 Jan 2010 15:57:22
Very Interesting topic.
Adding my 2 Euros worth on Schopenhauer. The ‘aphorism’ isn’t his. It’s a saying about long hair short mind with regards to women that comes from ancient times, especially patriarchal societies. Found in many variations in different countries.
One thing is true though that as a young man this–the most miserabilist and one of greatest pessimists amongst philosophers said:
I am very fond of women only if they would have had me.
But being often rejected and socially inept with girls [people in general- a loner/ loony as he was, lol] he then said:
Only the male intellect clouded by sexual lust is able to call the narow shouldered, the broad hipped, undersized and short legged sex, the fair sex.
Fair to him, I say : )
Though by the end of his life instead of calling them – suited to being only teachers and nurses of children cos they are childish themselves, silly and short sighted, big children their whole lives in one word – then when he became famous he softens up a little [while Elizabeth Ney- yes related to that good soldier, did make a bust of him] and said: women are capable of selflessness and insight.
Well it took a long time, but that was the best he could say in regards to women.
Though the guy must have been traumatized since mum and dad had a big age gap…or maybe cos his pa killed himself…or …or cos he loved himself too much. : )
Whatever it was good ol Arturo was all of his life [from the age of 6- based on his recollections, lol] disgruntled and depressed and deep down loved women, but feared rejection, was clumsy and said what he said cos he had too. If we lived nearby I would tell the guy to ‘Get out more’
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 1 Jan 2010 15:56:42
France need not worry overmuch about its carbon dioxide output and related green credentials. Its near zero output from (nuclear and hydro) electricity generation provides a huge advantage were it to invest heavily in the technology for electric road vehicles.
The euro economy is largely dictated by the ECB which avoids much of the Anglo-Saxon and Japanese policy of printing money. In fact the progress of the Japanese economy is probably the best "crystal ball" available to show how government efforts to stimulate economies work out. And its not good because Japan is entering its second period of deflation after a second spate of unprecedented public cash handouts to encourage spending. The (uncooperative!) citizens in receipt of these monies are paying off debts, and saving the rest!
http://biz.thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2009/3/4/business/20090304140236&sec=business
Thus whether governments can stimulate an economy or not depends on how it is done. By printing money - the answer is no. Unfortunately industrial competitiveness has been given away to the Chinese, so spending on public works seems the only solution. But that puts up debt, (and interest rates or debases the currency e.g., the UK pound), which is what governments want to avoid....
On a lighter note, AZLOON's reference to the Buddhist (chinese) calender uncannily reflects what we see and know of Nicolas Sarkozy because he may be typical of those born in the year of Goat!
Showy, impetuous, ego-centric, poor judgement, impulsive, capricious, fond of the good life, frequent romantic problems and it's never his fault(!) are all characteristics usually associated with Goats. His hints that he might not run for a second term reflect a desire to find a "greener meadow" where living is easier, and encouraged by Carla who is also a Goat!
(There are good points too, but I've run out of puff...)
Some others born in the year of the Goat include John Major, Pierre Laval, Mussolini, Mark Twain and Pierre Mendès-France.
Anyway its good for a new year's day diversion!
Posted by: john gregory flinn | 1 Jan 2010 15:54:27
[those you dismissively call ‘the blog's Swiss mafia’] Rick
It's a term of endearment, Rick. I think of you guys as a lobbying group of sorts.
Anyway, I feel like my Swiss rant is losing its steam, and I am looking elsewhere for material.
Prospero ano neuvo !
Posted by: azloon | 1 Jan 2010 15:12:41
Ziggy --
You're obviously 'on a roll' coming into the New Year.
Latest Gallup tracking poll shows Obama with 53% approval rating, not 50% as you say.
When one stretches/tweaks facts to make dubious points, I lose interest in reading their stuff.
Posted by: azloon | 1 Jan 2010 15:04:29
"['Fraid not, DODO, Rocket is a living and breathing person. CB]"
Has to be really. You couldn't invent a character like that.
Posted by: rockinred | 1 Jan 2010 14:57:53
ROCKET, you wrote: ‘If Zbig and is from Poland and over 30’. Sorry to disappoint you but he’s a self-confessed expert on many a weighty subject and all of twenty-one years old.
‘David Camoron [sic] is a pseudoconservative. He is really just another socialist like Bliar, Kinnochio and Hattersley . . . If he wants to win he must become the most conservative British politician. Tories, I'm warning you: unless you sack your leader and George Osborne the cash confiscator, you WILL lose for the fourth consecutive time. I promise.’ [Zbigniew M. Mazurak]
‘I'm a conservative journalist, blogger, ideologue and defense analyst. I was born on 5th Dec 1988.’ [Zbigniew M. Mazurak]
Posted by: Rick | 1 Jan 2010 14:47:20
[He might just decide to stop in 2012 in order to please Carla Bruni. ]
Hmm...
If he does just that, folks will be wondering why did Carla like him in first place...His charm? talent in literature? for being a funny guy?
or if the threat turns out to be true...Well she may like him for being Himself...and then move to the next President : )
---/
BTW - since today is Nahw Year, I wish everyone a good un. Health, Happiness and Luck.
CB & Azloon included. : )
p.s. my main concern remains France, what will happen to it [ her?] leaderless and Sarkoless. What a thought, there goes my year in anxiety and ruined...
Eh CB...bad news all year round : )
p.s2. If for Sarko's son to go people took the street with Bananas, what fruit can be used to persuade Sarko to stay:
a) apple
b) tomato
c) guanabana
or...
d) passionfruit
a,b,c,or d...
Oh and a Merry X-mas to all good folks, i mean 2010 one.
Posted by: Blendi Progri | 1 Jan 2010 14:35:06
ROCKET:
["If Zbig and is from Poland and over 30 he surely must have an insight into the socialized system"]
You can benefit from his insights here:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/themazurakshow
"I'm Zbigniew Mazurak, an uncompromising Polish conservative. My interests are world affairs (civilian and military), including American affairs. This means the whole range of political issues, as well as some non-political things. I hope that one day I will be allowed to immigrate to the US."
and here:
http://twitter.com/ziggymazurak
"I'm a conservative journalist, blogger, ideologue and defense analyst. I was born on 5th Dec 1988."
Posted by: sebastien | 1 Jan 2010 14:12:00
"btw BHL has been a consistent supporter of US/UK policies, stances and gesticulations over the years - but let him voice one word of dissent and down goes the faithful servant"
Posted by: Dominique II | 1 Jan 2010 01:25:11
The same happened with, let remember the name: Pierre Lelouch .
In the 03’s, he vociferously supported the US/GB pirate invasion of Iraq and as soon he believed to be accepted as a friend, he became a undesirable frog ! until the final humiliation :
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article6905422.ece
LOL
Posted by: DODO | 1 Jan 2010 14:01:52
Well, there’s always hionginandtonic, I suppose... A Happy New Year, Dot.
Posted by: Rick | 1 Jan 2010 13:59:40
TO RICK and DOT,
Happy New Year. I think hyaluronic acid does exist and is one of the main constituents of streptococci A. I also have somewhere in my brain that it triggers massive neuron (notably motor neuron) disintegration (it is dramatic!) in the last months of the Alzheimers and Parkinson group of neuro diseases.
On the other hand I suspect your antidote was a surfeit of some form of ironate or ironicodeine.
Posted by: richard jones | 1 Jan 2010 13:56:42
I have to agree with Zbig about his views on several issues. I will quickly name them and comment briefly try to comment further later in the day.
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 11:52:30
Je ne sais pas ce que les autres en pensent, mais je commence à croire sérieusement que Rocket est un personnage inventé par CB , juste pour nous provoquer : Imaginer un ultra conservateur américain obligé de se farcir plusieurs années de vie en France ( A Paris, qui plus est !) ne peut sortir que de l’imagination torturée d’un britannique.
Allons, Charles, avouez. C’est vous;
sinon, c’est pas possible :)
-----
“Dodo you shouldn't criticize the Heritage Foundation because of your pensée unique but in France this has always been the case. When in doubt - criticize. It's just simply a manifestation of fear of losing "les mamelles de l'état".
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 11:52:30
Rocket, ou qui que vous soyez, je me moque de la pensée unique autant que de votre III° US Reich.
Bonne année Rocket, et la santé, avant tout.
Santé mentale aussi, j'entends.
['Fraid not, DODO, Rocket is a living and breathing person. CB]
Posted by: DODO | 1 Jan 2010 13:06:28
If Zbig and is from Poland and over 30
ROCKET
birthdate if I remember correctly was 1988
Posted by: dot king | 1 Jan 2010 13:03:17
I have to agree with Zbig about his views on several issues. I will quickly name them and comment briefly try to comment further later in the day.
Primo.
"Most of taxpayers' money is spent on bureaucracies, bureaucrats, useless ministries and various welfare programs and entitlement programs which promote dependency on the government and cause the breakdown of families."
It's called keeping the social peace.
This is essentially true. A socialized system such as France's does indeed create a dependance by a high percentage of the population on government entitlements and therefore destroys initiative because people always believe that they will never be left behind. The problem in this is that a large number of people have become dependant on these entitlements and put off a serious effort to look for a job knowing the above very well. On the other hand a certain amount of solidarity is needed for those hard working people have lost their jobs and need a helping hand to make the transition from unemployed to employed. The problem is to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. The French unemployment entitlement are extremely long and also benefitted from by those who have no intention of finding work as they their threshold of acceptable existence has been lowered by the fact they do not have to work and can continue to live.
Segundo
"The unemployment rate is also very high, by your own admission and by the admission of the INSEE. This would be bad for any country, but is exceptionally bad for France, which, since the 1980s, has not experienced an unemployment rate below 7%."
Absolutely true. While Sarkozy speaks about how France has fared better than most industrialized countries during this "crise" (encore une crise!) he fails to mention that those industrialized contries during the period of high growth (speculation included) had unemployment rates in the 4 -5% range. "Crise" is a wonderful victimization word used in France to transfer blame for it's own structural failings. The problem is that during the last 25 years of never less than 7% how much individual initiate has be quashed because of a system which has created a sclerosis of risk and iniative not to mention the difficulties involved in finding employment. The "entrepreneur individual" status has set low limits on what people can earn with low taxation. Once an entrepreneur goes above the limits to this system they find themselves in the system so to speak.
Sarkozy was never a free marketeer. It was in style at the time of his praises for the British system. He picked up on it during a period of high growth and has simply done an about face returning to his roots when the going gets tough. I really don't see how a French politican can be a free marketeer and hope to be elected.
If Zbig and is from Poland and over 30 he surely must have an insight into the socialized system that those of us who have never lived under this type of system don't.
As for Obama or should I say the messiah. He is rapidly proving himself as the do nothing president especially in foreign relations. Or as one blogger told me recently. "He is not proving himself as a do nothing President because we knew this beforehand".
Dodo you shouldn't criticize the Heritage Foundation because of your pensée unique but in France this has always been the case. When in doubt - criticize. It's just simply a manifestation of fear of losing "les mamelles de l'état".
Happy New Year everyone.
Comments on Sarkozy's "voeux" would be welcomed by the bloggers. I found them almost comical especially when he spoke of respect for others and not insulting other people. Have these people who write his speeches no memory. I can cite dozens of examples where he has insulted, belittled, not to mention challanged to fights. (Brittany fisherman and New England reporters)
PS My New Years resolution is to chew my food slower!
Posted by: rocket | 1 Jan 2010 11:52:30